Гарри Гаррисон - Skyfall

As he reached the right spot he looked up, startled, as burning fragments of the ship tore by.

They were into the atmosphere. Just moments left.

Gregor took one second to snap his safety line to the ship. He must be steady now, and would need both hands. The plastic tubing was stiff but bent as he applied pressure, rolling it upon itself, compacting it into a ball he could clasp between his hands, heavy, twenty-five kilos or more. He was aware that he was dead now in more ways than one, that the radiation of the U-235 increased as the mass of metal was brought closer and closer. But not to critical mass, there wasn't enough of it for that. The hydrogen would have to moderate the reaction for that, slow down and trap the particles so that it went critical, became an atomic bomb.

“Yes,” he said, “now is the time.”

Holding the heavy sphere of uranium before him he moved to the engine, looked in. The sun was behind him now, shining into the chamber.

It was breathtaking. The hydrogen had been pumped in steadily for some minutes now. At first it had turned to gas, but in doing so it had chilled down the quartz chamber walls. As more and more hydrogen had poured in it had stopped vaporizing. The chamber was now filled and brimming over with the pale, transparent fluid, two hundred and fifty degrees below zero. As still more was pumped in globules formed at the open end and drifted away, touching Gregor's faceplate and puffing away as gas.

For a long instant he stared into that cold pool — then plunged in the uranium ball. It was heavy and he had to push to accelerate it and it moved firmly from his hand, down the length of the engine. Surrounded by a constantly renewed cloud of gas as the hydrogen boiled when it came near the warm metal. A gas cloud that prevented the liquid hydrogen from coming close enough to moderate the fast particles emerging from the uranium, prevented the chain reaction from starting.

This did not last very long. The metal cooled and the liquid collapsed onto it and touched it.

Strapped down, her body pressing out against the restraint, Coretta saw the shining form of Prometheus grow smaller, shrinking, framed between the gap of the closing doors, visible for one last instant. Then vanished as the doors slammed shut.

“We are at least forty miles from Prometheus,” Cooke said, his voice sounding in all their helmets. “Lifting up and — God…” He was silent for a moment. Then he spoke. “We're facing away. Thank God. You all right back there? A light, an explosion, I have never seen a light like that. It went up. It did. It's not going to impact after all. They're safe back on Earth.”

It was black inside the unlit cargo bay, as dark for Coretta as it was for the blinded pilots.

“Goodbye, Gregor,” she said softly, into the darkness.

“Air speed three hundred knots,” Decosta said.

“Looks good,” Cooke said. “I'm making the last turn into the glide path now. Drop the landing gear.”

Decosta threw the switch and watched silently until the green light flicked on. “Gear down and locked.”

There had been clouds over the entire East coast, with Florida socked in solid. They had watched it from space, seen the clouds grow closer and closer as they were dropped back into the atmosphere, until they were in them and flying blind. It made no difference to their flight plan since that was controlled by the computer. There was an invisible highway in the sky they had to follow, a trace on the screen that told them just what to do, just where to be. When the Orbiter broke through the low-hanging clouds the rain-washed length of the runway stretched out before them. Cooke handled the wheel with a light touch, squinting through the tendrils of steam above the nose as the rain vaporized when it struck the silica tiles that covered the hull. Tiles still radiant hot after the 2,400 degree temperatures they had withstood during reentry.

“Down,” Cooke said as the heavy tires impacted the wet concrete. Decosta took off his belt and stood up.

“I'm going to look after our passengers,” he said.

“Give me a report, soonest.”

Decosta climbed down through the access hatch to the mid deck below and opened the inner hatch of the airlock, leaving it open as he opened the other hatch into the blackness of the cargo bay. One of the pressure-suited figures was sitting up, looking in his direction, hands on helmet.

Coretta twisted, pulled at the helmet, tore it off and took in breath after breath of the damp air.

“I can smell the sea,” she said, then raised her hand. “And you can take that damn light out of my eyes.”

“Sorry. Everything all right?”

“It will be when we get their helmets off. Give me a hand.”

The Orbiter slowed, rocked as its brakes were applied, then eased to a stop. As soon as his helmet was off Patrick pressed his hands to the bandages over his eyes, then sat up and turned in Nadya's direction. But he was silent; there seemed to be nothing for any of them to say.

“Be right back,” Decosta said, turning away.

“Hey, leave the light,” Coretta called out. “Or can you turn on the lights in here?”

“There aren't any. Why don't we all go into mid deck compartment.” The floor moved as the tractor hooked on and began to tow them slowly from the runway.

They were clumsy after their stay in free fall and willing to be helped by the pilot. The pressure suits were hot and cumbersome and they took them off before going into the compartment. The numbness persisted; they said nothing, just sat there and waited until they finally stopped and the outer door was opened.

Only when they heard the wild cheering did they realize that the voyage was over at last.

“There, in the middle of your screen, ladies and gentlemen, you can see them coming out, three figures, small at this distance though giants in the history of mankind. The ambulance is drawn up and they are entering it, no wait, they're stopping. Turning. Dr. Coretta Samuel is saying something, we can't hear it, there's no microphone up there. Now she's turning and following the others inside the ambulance and the door is closing. So this epic adventure is over at last. In a moment we will be talking to Major Cooke and Captain Decosta, the pilots of the rescue mission….”

One by one the consoles in Mission Control were shut down, the lights flickered off, the needles on the meters dropped to zero. The big screen showed a commercial TV channel now with a picture of the crew of Prometheus entering an ambulance, the announcer's voice echoing hollowly in the silence of the hall. Flax looked up at the screen, then down at the big cigar clutched in his hand. The victory cigar. Light up and smoke when the mission was successful. He closed his fingers slowly and the cigar broke, flaked, rained down in crumbled pieces to the floor.

Three of them were back, that was something. Grabbed from the fire at the last moment. But two of them pilots, good pilots, with bandages on their eyes and maybe they would never see again. But the greater disaster of a crash had been averted. Prometheus would not be plowing into San Francisco. The Russian had been good, really good.

Flax's thoughts rambled in exhausted circles, fatigue washed through his limbs, the ball of fire that had been growing steadily in his stomach spread out as though to fill his entire chest, his body.

He slumped forward, very slowly, his head dropping to the cold plastic of the console, his arms slipping off and flopping at his sides. Gravity asserted itself more and more as he slid to the floor and lay there. Motionless.

“Oh my God!” one of the technicians shouted. “It's Flax. Get the doctor!”

They straightened his great form out on the tiled floor, opened his collar wide, loosened his yards-long belt. There were running footsteps and they parted to let the doctor through.