"Brennert, Alan - The Refuge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brennert Alan)

"You took a ten-hour catnap," came a familiar voice beside her. Ray looked up at
the tall, powerfully built man towering by his bedside. "Give or take a few
days," he said with a laugh. He was a robust, handsome man in his sixties, his
face hardly lined, with a full head of silver-white hair; he was wearing an
impeccably cut gray three-piece suit. He smiled and extended a hand. "I'm
Sanford Valle. Welcome to the Refuge."

Ray took his hand. Valle had the kind of too-hard grip men of physical power
often used to gauge a stranger's mettle, or, alternately, to intimidate them;
Ray was still too weak to play the game, though he did wonder about the kind of
man who would play it with someone in a hospital bed.

"'Refuge'?" Ray said. Even in his bewildered condition he could hear the capital
R in Valle's voice when he said the word.

"I built it," Valle said proudly. "Before the collapse. It's totally
self-contained, self-supporting. Protected from the elements by that particle
barrier you encountered."

Ray blinked, trying once again to find something in his memory which would jibe
with anything he'd seen or heard so far. "What do you mean -'collapse'?"

Valle glanced at Gina and Franklin. "His memory loss is particularly severe,
isn't it?"

"Look," Ray said, more irritated than afraid now, "just where the hell am I?
Alaska?"

Valle, Gina, and Franklin exchanged rueful glances.

"Not quite," Valle said dryly. "Try Florida."

It began at an oil rig off the coast of Tierra del Fuego, and, name
notwithstanding, the world did not end in fire. The sonic drill used to sink the
well was old technology to OPEC, but to the owners of the platform -a small
Chilean petroleum combine -- it was proudly state of the art. They sank the well
deeper than anyone in the region ever had --a good two thousand feet below sea
level. So deep into the continental slope, in fact -gouging into Precambrian
bedrock -- that they inadvertently unearthed bacteria which hadn't seen the
light of day in billennia.

Not that anyone had known that, at first. The first hint of trouble didn't come
until a week later, when the workers on the oil rig awoke one morning to find
the waters surrounding them strangely transformed --into a gelatinous mass
stretching a hundred yards in every direction, and six hundred feet straight
down, to the ocean floor itself (asphyxiating all marine life unfortunate enough
to become trapped in it).

A gelatinous mass which seemed, moreover, to be expanding at an alarming rate .
. .