"Brunner, John - Wrong End Of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brunner John)

In the center of Cowville, that huge squat bulk brooded like a queen-bee in her hive. It was the headquarters of the biggest single employer in the country, except government, and of course without government it could not survive. Sometimes Danty thought of it as a temple, the fane of the priests who served the god Defense.
Cowville was old. Some said it was the oldest city in the state. The insertion of that hulking building into its center had deformed it in a curious fashion, like the pressure of a wedge being hammered home in a block of wood. People and the buildings they lived and worked in-seemed not so much to cluster around this focus of vast wealth, as to have been compressed by it, like garbage compacted for disposal. They were prevented from expanding outside the original city limits by strictly-enforced ordinances, because nothing must interfere with the beautiful setting of Lakonia. Not all of them had come to seek work, or to take advantage of the money flowing freely around Energetics General at a time when half the states of the Union were depressed; some had come merely in order to live close to Lakonia, for the privilege of
walking to the lakeshore and staring at its towers, focus of indescribable ambitions that they would never fulfill.
Even so there was 'little resentment of its existence. Lakonia had salvaged a beloved scrap of the American dream. At a time when people were losing faith in their older god, Business, because it had fouled the air and ruined the countryside and made the rivers stink, one corporation had created a new and lovely lake, whose water was purer than a mountain creek.
After that, over ten years, came the city-the most desirable place to live on the continent.
Meantime they shut away, behind trees, the original city of Cowville, and-apart from what unavoidable maintenance was called for to keep it habitable-let it rot. They were content to say, "You don't grow a rose without manure."
Yet, like the nearly-but-not-quite flavor of hydroponic food, life in Lakonia lacked something. A spice. A savor. "I remember it from the old days!" people claimed-then when challenged to describe it, confessed they couldn't. "Nonetheless," they maintained stoutly, "it was real! It can't have vanished completely!"
Therefore, now and then, they set off in search of it, and for want of anywhere better to start looking they came to Cowvdle, to the littered streets and the stores crammed with over-priced knick-knacks and the preLakonia apartment blocks that had been sub-divided and sub-divided again. It was hard to find living-space in Cowville now. One could foresee an end like the ancient Chinese system of land-tenure, the ancestral holding split up among successive generations until a family was compelled to share a broom-closet.
If they looked in the wrong places they got robbed, or raped, or slashed with a bottle in a bar. But if they were lucky, or someone had given them the right advice beforehand, they learned to recognize landmarks - signposts, clues. A message on a wall, chalked up at midnight, at 4 A.M. washed away by rain. In a store, a handwritten notice: MEETING, followed by a date, a time, an address. In the window of an apartment, a cheap printed card: THINGS FOUND. Nature of the things not specified. TRACING AGENTS. PROBLEMS SERVICE. CASES UNDERTAKEN.
You could follow these signs if you chose. They led to

another city altogether. They led to the city Danty lived in.

He left the hovercar at a halt on the roof of one of the city's oldest surviving buildings, a good sixty years old. It had seemed like a logical idea, when they extended the line around the lake, to use existing roofs for halts, but they had had to straitjacket the building with concrete beams when the recurrent vibration threatened to shake it down. Now the beams served a double purpose, acting also as supporters for an exterior staircase and for landings on three sides of the building. The interior stairways and the elevator shaft had been turned into shower-rooms and kitchenettes. There had been two apartments on the top floor of this building; now there were eight, entered by doors that had been regular windows.
In the remaining window of the apartment nearest the stairs, dimly legible through the wire-reinforced glass, a card said simply CONSULTATIONS. It was into this one that Danty let himself, with a key that he wore on a steel chain around his neck. It was a precious key; there were only two like it. It was risky to use a stock type of lock in modern Cowville, because so many people had complete collections of the American Lock and Vault Corporation's range. If you could afford it, you had one hand-made.
The apartment trembled a little as the hovercar he'd arrived on accelerated towards its next destination.
"Magdal" Danty called as he shut the door. There was no answer. He hadn't really expected one, unless she was in the toilet.
The apartment consisted of one large room, along two walls of which couches that doubled as divans had been built in, plus an alcove cut off with a curtain, a shower cabinet, and a kitchen made of fire-proof board. As always, it was untidy, with a dozen books lying around open, a stack of sheets torn from a notepad in the middle of the one large low table. He glanced at the latter to make sure none bore a message for him, but they were covered in indecipherable technicalities.
He swore under his breath. Of course, she did have many other calls on her time, but you'd have thought that today . .
His resentment . died. Maybe it was better this way. Maybe he needed a chance to think over what he had done. Until he was in sight of Lakonia, he'd been able
to mute knowledge of his own actions in his mind, making them distant and dream-Me. Now they were throbbing and pounding in his memory.
More to distract himself than because he was hungry, he brought a soy burger and a carton of milk out of the freezer, switched on the TV, and sat down to eat in front of it. He caught the tail-end of the weather forecast, and then followed the day's counts: pollen, RA-high beta, low gamma-KC's, Known Carcinogens, SO, and the rest. But he wasn't paying attention. He was thinking about the man from the sea.
Images came to his mind: He pictured the disturbance the stranger would cause, like a small, very hard pebble dropped into a loose-journal led complex of machinery. Slack would be taken up here and there in its bearings. Bit by bit it would become possible to deduce who he was, why he had come, what he hoped to achieve.
And then, perhaps, something would have to be done.
"Do thou therefore perform right and obligatory actions," he quoted to himself under his breath, "for action is superior to inaction."

With a sudden violent gesture he thrust away his plate. He linked his brown thin fingers together so tightly the knuckles paled. His teeth threatened to chatter, so that he had to knot his jaw-muscles to hold them still.
Magda! For pity's sake hurry back!
I'm scared!

Lora Turpin had had all she could take, and said so to her mother. Her mother, with her usual infuriating white satin calmness-out of a bottle with "White Satin" on the label--called her a misbegotten moron and suggested that 5 radiation must have affected the ovum from which she was conceived. That finished the discussion. Theatrically Lora stormed out of the room, out of the apartment, out of the building, and into a hovercar going anywhere. ,
If it had been night, she would have driven; there were five cars in the basement garage she could get the keys for. But she hated sawing through slow day-time traffic, and what was more she was forbidden to ride the hover line, which was why she did it when she was in a bad temper.
This time it didn't lead to the anticipated result. Naturally, because she was very pretty, several men leered at her, but they were all reeky ancients, at least forty, and the only hand that did try stroking her bare waist belonged to a fat mannish woman who got off at the second halt. It was around then that she realized, as the redwood trees loomed ahead, that this car was heading in the wrong direction. She'd meant to get off at a halt by one of the yacht-pools and pick up a boy with a boat. She hadn't had a boy for over a week.
Almost, she made to leave the car. But she changed her mind. What the hell. She'd never ridden a Cowville line to the end.
Curious, she watched the squalid city slide beneath, and then around, as the line approached the monstrous mausoleum of Energetics General, and then beneath again: an area of lower buildings, harking vainly back to the foundation of the city, to the pioneering image of the original cow-town. A mobile illuminated figure shamelessly copied from "Vegas Vic" beckoned customers to a block crowded with twenty-four-hour bars and sex clubs. That passed behind too, and the line descended to ground- .` level-or, more likely, the ground rose to meet the line.
By the time a mechanical-sounding voice announced the terminus, the city was petering away to shabby tenements intermingled with warehouses. A distant roaring indicated that she was close to the airport through which EG dispatched its products, but that was out of sight behind a hill. There was a thick industrial stench in the sir.
Uncertainly, she got out, last of the passengers to do so. There had only been three others in the car, a tired eyed black woman and two black kids about twelve. Litter crunched under her sandals as she stepped onto the platform. Before her extended a street of gray buildings. Signs here and there -identified small manufacturing companies making sanitary tampons, plastic cups, door-furniture. At the end of the street was a scrap yard where a tall crane was picking up metal on a magnet. The only person visible was pushing a hand-truck laden with garbage-cans, a sour-faced black.
She hesitated, glancing around. Nearby was a sales kiosk offering candies, cigarettes, and porn. Its display window was of the old-fashioned intermittent-mirror type, and she caught sight of herself in it as it went into the reflecting phase. She stared with annoyance at her image. Her hair was exquisite, honey-gold; her face was oval, though not so perfect as to be dull. But there was an ill-tempered twist to her mouth, which she detested, yet which she could not help. She felt so furious with the world today.
Of course, she had come straight out of the apartment in what she happened to be wearing: play top, shorts, sandals, and literally nothing else. It had been sheer luck that she'd had a pocketful of change. It would have been unbearable to go back for her wrist-purse.
Then the window cleared, and she realized she was being stared at by the owner of the kiosk, a fat middle-aged black. A tooth was missing in the center of his grin. She spun on her heel at random and started down the street. She was just a little afraid. Yet the sensation was somehow stimulating. She felt she needed to do something terrible. Something that would shock the living shit out of her parents. Anything.
The concept took root in her mind, without words. It had the appeal of the suicide's note: "You'll be sorry for what you made me dot"
And they had made her do it, hadn't they? Grandmother

with her wood-rasp voice and her endless condemnation of young people today-well, she'd endured that all her life. But add in the nuisance of this newly arrived Canadian, Holtzer, and the information that her abominable brother Peter was going to be crowded into her bedroom they got on each other's nerves, and he was a reeky waster, and he'd left it until this morning to admit that he'd overspent his allowance and couldn't afford a hotel while Holtzer was here . . Not that it was Holtzer's fault, of course; he seemed rather nice, with his square face, curly brown hair, and ready smile. But-damnation! If there was only one guest-room, and Grandmother was in it, and Dad insisted on accommodating this Canuck, why couldn't he move in with Mom? Lots of married people had gone back to sharing a room!
When she suggested it, her mother had given her a long, steady stare. "I shouldn't mention that to your father if I were you," she'd said.
"Well, aren't you married?" had been Lora's caustic retort. And that began the row that drove her out.
She realized suddenly that while she was brooding, a trio of young blacks had appeared at the end of the street, near the scrap yard gate, and they'd spotted her. For an instant she was minded to rash back on the platform; the car was warming up for its return trip. Then she realized this was just the kind of thing she was after. She'd never had a black boy, let alone three of them at once.

Pausing after getting out of the hovercar, Magda Hansen looked down at the narrow concrete landing outside her apartment. There was a woman there-smartly dressed in dark blue, age indeterminate, heavily made-up, obviously wealthy and more likely to live in Lakonia than Cowville-who was wavering back and forth before the door. She poised her hand to press the bell, drew back, looked at the card saying CONSULTATIONS, made to turn away, and went through the whole cycle again.
Magda hoped fervently she would give up. But she didn't.