"David Brin - The River of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

was giving them one of my standard cocktail party responses. Rise and shine.
"Sorry, sir. Science fiction. I'll remember that." He nodded. "Mr. Brand, we have
orders to ask you to come with us. Your special commission with the Emergency
Management Agency has been activated."
I must have stared like a dummy. All that was getting through to me was that I
was about to be taken somewhere by two Brobdingnagians with guns... and before
my morning orange juice!
At this point, one of my characters would have drawn his laser pistol... or spoken
up loudly so that the robot doorbell could later tell his best friend what had
happened. Or he'd have coolly disarmed his would-be captors and escaped out the
bathroom window. I managed to surpass those schemes by grunting, "My what?"
"Your special commission with the Emergency Management Agency, sir. You've
been receiving a yearly emolument to keep your name and address on a list of
unconventional consultants for hypothetical national crises. Surely you remember,
sir?"
Never let anyone tell you a giant can't fit his mouth around twenty-dollar words.
I did recall, at last. My yearly stipend had been a paltry one hundred dollars a
year, ten percent going to Larry because it had been his idea to have me sign up in
the first place. In exchange I had agreed to advise my country should little green men
ever land, or dinosaurs rise up out of the sea, or whatever... and I promised to drop
a card to a board corporal in a small office in a Pentagon subbasement, should I
ever change my address. The program had been budgeted for twenty years in
advance by one of our recent, workaholic Presidents, when he found out the U.S.
didn't have a game plan in the event a giant comet or something was discovered
headed for the Earth. I think he used money stolen from the White House janitorial
budget.
"They want me," I said.
"Yessir," the erudite truncheon-wielder confirmed. "Now, if you'll please get
dressed... ?"
I was allowed to take my briefcase and a toothbrush. The rest "would be
provided when I joined the crisis team."
As we left my apartment building, we saw two ambulances pull away, carrying a
few more of the night's catatonics. The bystanders watched with none of the typical
detachment of New Yorkers. One could tell they were afraid.
"Am I finally going to meet Carl Sagan?" I asked as the MPs hustled me into a
green government Plymouth.
"Nossir," the one with the vocabulary answered. "I believe he's already become a
victim. The computer chose you as the surviving consultant with the best set of
qualifications. We're now taking you to the main medical team at Johns Hopkins,
where they are expecting you."
That's how I became a big shot in the investigation of the ComaSlow near-death.
A computer picked me. I remember thinking that there must have been a lot of
victims, already, for the poor machine to have gotten so hard up.


The hospitals were in chaos. Chronic-care units were filled to overflowing with
immobile humanity. Armories and high school gymnasiums were converted to handle
the growing number of victims.
The symptoms were frightening.
Physicians listened to heartbeats that dragged on, lonely and deep, for over a