скачать книгу бесплатно
David stopped and took out a small notebook and a pencil and began to write:
“When I was a kid, all I wanted to do was express myself and feel the world. Where is that now? There was no + and -. There was balance. Maybe unhappiness is just the force of that balance. It just wants to tell us, ‘Stop taking, it’s time to give’.”
David looked at the tape and remembered how he had decided to sell everything and leave. It all seemed far in the past now. How had he had the guts to do such a thing? He didn’t quite understand it either. Had he chosen it, or was he just reacting to the circumstances? Maybe it was the monotonous work, the long hours that forced him to do it. Forced him to quit the job, to move out of his apartment, to leave London. How did he end up on the other side of the world? Amazingly, the trip seemed like complete madness to him when he was at his father’s house. But now it all – what’s around and what’s inside – seems so logical and so singularly true.
There was a buzzing sound from the bag and a little later the music of his phone. David froze in place, unsure of what was happening. He looked behind him and listened. The sound was intensifying.
“What the hell?” he dropped his bag from his shoulders.
He fumbled for his phone, surprised that he had forgotten to turn it off. All it said on the screen was ‘Incoming Call’. No phone number, no name from the address book. “How is there even network service here?” He swiped the screen to accept the call and held it to his ear. A loud ring and rattle came from the speaker. David abruptly pulled the phone away from his ear and clutched at the pain. He tried to drop the call, but there was no way he could do it. The phone was unresponsive. He turned it off with a button and stomped his foot in pain.
“Shit,” David sat down on the ground, “what was this all about?”
He rubbed his temple and massaged his ear, wondering what it was. He thought maybe it was some kind of magnetic field from the iron ore or something. He looked at his hand and saw that there was blood on the fingers. His thoughts stopped dramatically. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket, tore part of it off, put it in his ear, and walked onward until a fright found him among those mountains. His head was buzzing, but he didn’t want to lose the spirit that had come to him that morning. The steps became less smooth, and the philosophical thoughts faded away.
“Balance, you say?” he thought. “Will see.”
David quickened his stride, kicking rocks in frustration.
Part 2 – Chapter 16
“Let’s get to the point,” said Jean-Jacques Dordain, as organizer, and he looked expectantly at Charles Bolden. “Charley, tell us, what’s going on?” changing his tone to a friendly one, the head of the European agency asked. “Why NASA gives no response to our inquiries?”
Charles Bolden, the head of NASA, looked at him with a tired smile. He looked around the large room, where about a hundred people from all over the world were sitting. There were representatives of the European Union, several top officials from the United States, China, and Russia. Charles Bolden turned on his microphone and cleared his throat.
“Well, folks,” he began, “here’s the deal. I can’t explain everything, but I’ll try to tell you what we’ve been able to recover. We launched two Voyagers in ’77. Both are still in service and our stations are still getting their signals. The crafts are performing better than we could have even imagined. They completed their mission years ago and are now moving away from the solar system by inertia, as we call it. The project was not without difficulties. On the approach to Uranus, Voyager 2 had an emergency situation. The signal was lost, and we thought we’d lost it. But then the signal came back.”
“No signal? Can you explain?” someone at the table asked.
“I have many versions of this incident, and the official NASA position is one of the memory clusters was damaged. That’s right, the device was damaged, but how it happened we can’t explain. The fact is that according to the data we were able to reconstruct, it turns out that the device was not moving in space for about 36 minutes.”
“Charley, didn’t move in space?” Jean-Jacques Dordain clarified.
“Yes,” Charles Bolden swiped his face, “it stopped.”
People in the hall began to look at each other and murmured.
“Have I got that right?” looking around the hall, Mr. Dordain said. “Voyager 2 stopped for 36 minutes on approach to Uranus? You mean… stopped at all?”
“We have the trajectory reports, the mission correction due to the 36 minute gap, and the program to exclude the damaged cluster from the transmission,” Charles Bolden pulled the documents out of a folder.
“But Voyager 2 has continued on its way, right? It’s in communication.” asked a representative of the Chinese agency.
“Yes,” Mr. Bolden turned around, “that’s right. The spacecraft has got back up to speed without any action on our part. Until this week, NASA believed that the discrepancy was tentative due to the desynchronization of the spacecraft with the control center.”
There was a pause in the room. Then the hubbub and commotion began to grow. Jean-Jacques Dordain collapsed in his seat. One of the American generals turned on his microphone:
“This information is raw, Mr. Bolden just wanted to say…” his voice drowned in the noise of the crowd.
After a moment, everyone’s confusion turned into a thirst for information.
“All right,” Mr. Dordain turned on his microphone, “all right, you have spatial telemetry. According to this data, Voyager hasn’t moved for 36 minutes, and you have a damaged memory sector on your device. Don’t you think that’s a transmission error.”
“That’s exactly what we told everyone,” Charles Bolden replied. “Corrected the course and continued the mission.”
“And now we have a recording from this device broadcasted somewhere in the Himalayas?” said the Indian general.
“Gentlemen,” the Russian general interrupted them, “in a couple of hours the Nepalese army together with our scientists will survey the square. Let’s not go crazy. It is not a fact that these things are related.”
Charles Bolden turned to his colleague from the European Space Agency and held his hands apart. Jean-Jacques Dordain silently said, “Wow!” and looked around the room, where a hundred adults were fiercely arguing with each other and trying to prove something. Some people tried to call the head of NASA or someone in his entourage to account, but Charles Bolden only shook his head in frustration as a sign that he had said enough.
Part 2 – Chapter 17
Yulia and Dr Capri starred in different directions, looking at the mountains that surrounded their helicopter on all sides. They were tense and quiet. The two pilots sat in the front, and the radio technician sat across from the doctor and Yulia. Yulia kept adjusting the huge headphones, which were supposed to muffle the whistle of the propeller, but only irritated her.
“How much longer is the flight?” Yulia asked the doctor in English.
Tulu-Manchi turned to the officer of communications and pointed to his watch.
“Thirty minutes to the point,” the officer said in Nepali.
He was holding a device that looked like a notebook computer and a sonar at the same time, and he tried to stare at it steadily.
“Half an hour,” the doctor repeated in English to Yulia.
She looked at the mountains overhanging to the left of the helicopter. These ridges had no edge. Only the haze blurred their disordered rows into the horizon. Those that were closer seemed like black ruins, and behind them stuck out snow-covered peaks.
The communications officer knocked on the device.
“What happened?” Dr Capri turned to him again.
“The unit is malfunctioning,” the officer replied.
“What’s going on?” the second pilot asked over the intercom.
“The electronics are going crazy,” said the captain. “We have to shut down all our systems. Contact the base.”
The aide began to press some switches and speak loudly into the radio. Yulia looked at the movements going on around her and wondered why she had agreed to this adventure, and why she hadn’t refused to her boss when he asked to go with the military. “Yulia, we have agreed with the Nepalese government that you can fly with the squad, we need to understand what’s going on there,” the boss’s words came to mind. She shifted her gaze from the frowning communications officer to the co-pilot. He jogged his hand over all the toggle switches on the panel and deactivated them. The helicopter stopped rocking from side to side. Yulia exhaled. “That’s enough. Enough!” she repeated.
Dr Capri listened intently to the crew’s conversations. He was trying to figure out if the chatter was related to the signal or if it was just a helicopter malfunction. The pilots were talking to the base.
“We have some kind of electronics malfunction,” the co-pilot said the last phrase.
The captain joined in the conversation:
“Do we continue to fly to the designated target?” he waited tensely for an answer.
“Yes, continue flight, subject to crew safety,” the base reported.
“Understood,” the captain replied and turned on the intercom. “Is the equipment operational?” he turned to the communication officer.
“Captain, the equipment is out of order,” the officer replied with a show of hands.
“Get a map of the area and mark the last position on it,” the captain said with determination to carry out the order.
“Yes,” the co-pilot responded.
Yulia tugged at Dr Capri’s sleeve and looked at him with an expression of bewilderment. Dr Capri began to explain the military’s conversation:
“The electronics are out of order. But we’re going to try to find the source on the regular map. We seem to have been close by.”
Yulia shook her head and, pressing her lips together, turned to the window. She felt fear creeping up and imagined she was talking to her mother on the phone and describing her condition, “Mom, everything burns inside. It’s like a mixture of despair, misunderstanding, resentment, and fear.” The cocktail was clearly not to Yulia’s taste. She looked at the mountains around her and thought that this would never happen to her in Moscow. “And I don’t really need it!”
Dr Capri fatherly put his hand on her shoulder.
“Yulia,” he began to say in his usual calm and judicious voice, “please don’t despair.”
He, also, looked at the mountains and nodded a little understandingly.
“Soon it will be over. I’m sure we’ll find someone’s portable player lying on a hiking trail and go back,” he smiled, following Yulia. “And then I’ll show you Pashupatinath. It’s an amazing place. The biggest Shiva temple in the world. I’ll take you to the lake called Rani Pokhari. You will like it.”
Yulia wiped her tears and patted Tulu-Manchi’s hand to show that she agreed. He smiled and pointed to the mountain ahead. It was Kanchenjunga. Yulia flicked her nose and with a sense of the universality of this mountain exhaled loudly and long with a ‘Ho’ sound.
“The point from where the signal is supposedly coming from is over there, under that peak,” the co-pilot pointed into the distance.
“We’ll make three tapering circles and if we don’t find anything, we’ll head back to base,” the captain said.
He did a small maneuver, the helicopter shook violently.
“Engine power is dropping!” he shouted. “Something is wrong with the machine!”
The helicopter began to descend against the actions of the pilots. The rotor blades began to slow down and the sound density decreased.
“Select a landing spot!” commanded the captain. “Everyone, grab hold of the handrails!”
The helicopter was approaching the ground. Tulu-Manchi held Yulia’s hand tightly. But she looked tiredly at the actions of the military and the doctor and did absolutely not feel the fall. Yulia stopped understanding what was happening. She turned as pale as the snow on the mountain tops around her. Her eyes rolled back, and she fell from this mountain madness into the quiet surf of her subconscious. The captain yanked the lever and the helicopter hovered just in front of the ground for a moment and landed gently, as gently as it could on the hillside. Everything went quiet.
“Are you all right?” looking at Yulia with fright, the doctor asked.
“No,” replied Yulia calmly, coming to her senses, “I’m not alright.”
The assistant captain opened the helicopter doors from the outside and helped Yulia out. The helicopter was sliding down the mountain. The pilots began throwing rocks under the wheels. The helicopter slid down a few more centimeters and froze.
Yulia, Dr Capri, the communications officer, and the two pilots stood in the middle of the mountain and looked at the bizarre giant steel dragonfly, which looked absurd in this landscape. Around the military and scientists towered mountains and an immense silence that contrasted strongly with the noise and anxiety that had ended a moment before.
The military put a few more large rocks under the wheels of the helicopter for reassurance. They took a few steps back, assessing the situation, trying to comprehend what had happened.
“Hey! Are you okay?” an English speech rang out behind them.
The assistant captain drew his gun and pointed it in the direction of the approaching figure.
“Stop and raise your hands!” shouted the soldier in Nepali.
The man stopped and put his hands in the air.
“I don’t understand you,” came the English speech, “I think you want me to do this.”
Tulu-Manchi asked the pilot to lower his weapon and said in English:
“Excuse us, are you a tourist?”
“Yes, I’m…” the man with the raised hands hesitated, “I’m an English tourist. I saw your helicopter falling and ran here.”
Dr Capri began to walk up the slope toward the sunlit figure behind him.
“My name is Dr Tulu-Manchi Capri,” the doctor said as he approached the young man.
“Hello,” the young man shook the doctor’s hand, “my name is David Conel.”
“Sorry about the gun,” the doctor said embarrassedly as he accompanied David to the helicopter. “We are doing scientific research here with the military. This is Yulia. And these,” he circled the group of military men, “are our escort.”
The doctor invited David to come up to Yulia, and went to the captain to explain that there is no threat and this is an ordinary tourist from England.
“Hello,” the young man said, filling the pause. “My name is David Conel.”
“Yulia Danilina,” Yulia answered, looking at the man incredulously.
“It can’t be possible that the helicopter broke down because of him,” she thought, looking at the puny long-haired guy with a tourist backpack behind his back, “and the signal is obviously not his doing.”
David looked confused and looked at the helicopter with childlike delight.
“It was a good landing, but obviously not planned,” David said, smiling.
“Certainly,” Yulia said with a little cheerfulness, “our electronics failed,” she blurted out in a simple voice.
“Oh!” David was surprised and looked at the helicopter.
Yulia couldn’t recognize the emotion David had just expressed and hesitated even more.
“Oh?” Yulia repeated, trying to keep the intonation and at the same time change it to a questioning one.
“Yesterday my phone went crazy and rang just like that, and when I picked it up, it made some kind of hissing and whistling sound,” David said, reasoning, and then pointed to his ear and the cloth in it.
Tulu-Manchi heard David’s last phrase and looked tensely at Yulia.
“David,” said the doctor, smiling, “will you please tell me again what happened to you and when? And more particularly.”
Part 2 – Chapter 18
