Word: crew
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...imaginative physics is consistently beguiling. But the elegant planning and wondrous machines he describes fail to anticipate a simple problem: the Quintans do not want to talk. Flying high above the planet, the crew of Hermes can see signs of a highly advanced society. But attempts to communicate are met first with silence and then with hostility; unmanned probes carrying messages of peace are attacked. The earthmen begin to wonder whether the planners of their glorious mission "had invested billions and lifted mountains in order to find a civilization gone berserk...
...Hermes has the power to force Quinta to respond or to destroy it, but such a victory would constitute a defeat. One crew member tells the captain, "Whatever you do -- if you do not retreat -- will result in a fiasco." ( The captain has grown increasingly pessimistic: "Any detailed study of an alien technology was futile. Its fragments, like pieces of a broken mirror, would not yield a coherent picture; they were the indistinct result, only, of the thing that had shattered...
...officers and enlisted men on the Stark, the duty seemed almost too routine. They had been patrolling the gulf for nearly two months, spending much of their time on "Condition Three" alert: midway in a range of five conditions, it meant that a third of the crew was on duty at all times, working four-hour shifts before taking eight hours off. The ship's varied defensive systems were all manned and presumed to be operational...
...mile radius, other American military eyes were also watching the gulf. Earlier, an Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) surveillance plane had taken off from its base in Saudi Arabia, which operated the electronics-laden Boeing 707 jointly with the U.S. On radar, the combined U.S.-Saudi crew detected a single Iraqi Mirage F-1 aircraft as it lifted off from the Shaibah military airport ten miles southwest of Basra at around 8 p.m. Heading southeast along Saudi Arabia's coast as Iraqi planes often do, the Mirage flew much closer to Bahrain than was normal. Suddenly, the fighter jerked...
...meet the widowed Hanff's closest friends, a wealthy young couple, a well-heeled actress daughter of a Park Avenue matron and a working-girl neighbor and her British boyfriend. They are a motley crew whose collective eccentricity is matched only by the writers own. All of these episodes--save one in which the actress, temporarily in London, scopes out the infamous bookstore for her pal back in the States--are irrelevant to the story's principal theme, bibliophilia, and remain half-baked...