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.
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.