"Chalker,.Jack.L.-.And.The.Devil.Will.Drag.You.Under.V1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

She wished she knew where she was going, and why.

He was a strong, strikingly handsome man dressed much like a lumberjack. He, too, had no idea why he was here. He had been going to New Zealand, he recalled. That was where they said the best chance would be. He had been ready to go, had gotten a corporate jet authorized, and gotten into his fancy sports car in Denver for a ride out to the airport.
But he hadn't gone to the airport, a short distance away. He had continued, as if in a dream, driving all-out like a maniac for this place a day ago.
And now he found himself wandering the cold, wind-blown streets strewn with litter and garbage and the remains of civilization in which nobody cares any more. Wandering, still not knowing why.
Wind whipped and buffeted him, and he pulled up his collar and wished idly that he'd thought to pack a ski mask. It was getting hard to see, like skiing without goggles.
He bumped into the woman before he saw her. It was a hard bump, and they both tumbled over and gave out oaths which, once composure returned, turned into mutual apologies.
Both were back on their feet so quickly that neither could offer the other assistance.
"Hey, look, I'm sorry," they both said at once, stopped, and laughed at their synchronisticity.
The woman suddenly stopped laughing and a strange look replaced that of mirth.
"You know," she said wonderingly, "that's the first time I've heard laughter since The Accident."
He was suddenly serious, too, and nodded for a moment. "I'm Mac Walters," he told her.
"Jill McCulloch," she responded.
He looked around. "Hey! It looks like that little bar is open over there! Let's get out of this crap and relax," he suggested, then added, "That is, unless you have something more important to do."
She chuckled dryly. "Does anybody these days? Lead on."
They quickly crossed and walked past the few' abandoned storefronts down to the place. THE LIGHTHOUSE, the small sign announced.
A blast of warmth greeted them as they entered and shut the door behind them. Electricity was getting to be an intermittent rarity; to find a place such as this, with everything working and all looking so normal, was like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It couldn't exist, not in these times, but it did. They didn't question it, just found an empty booth and sat down, exhausted, across from each other.
The barman spotted them. "What'll it be, folks?" he called.
"Double bourbon and water," Walters called back, then looked over at the woman just now getting out of her heavy fur-lined coat. She is damned good-looking, he thought.
"Scotch and water," she told him, and he relayed the order to the barman. The drinks were there in less than two minutes; in the meantime they just sat there, more or less looking at each other.
She was small-no more than one hundred and sixty centimeters, maybe shorter-but she seemed exceptionally-solid? He struggled for a word. Athletic, he decided. Like a gymnast or a dancer. Her hair was cut short and seemed just right for her face, a sexy oval that seemed somehow almost perfectly childlike. She has green eyes, he thought suddenly.
While surveying, he was being surveyed. He was a big man, not much under two meters in height, but there was no fat. He was in excellent condition, and his ruggedly handsome face was complemented by a rich, full red beard and long but professionally styled matching hair.
And while they looked at each other, they were in turn being looked over by a strange-looking little man sitting on a bar stool.
The woman seemed to sense his intrusion and turned to look at him for a moment. He averted her gaze and turned back to his drink, but he had caught the look in her eyes. Haunted eyes. Both of them. They know the score. They've given up hope.
The song oh the radio was over, and an announcer's voice was on.
"The massive flooding has pretty well wiped out the Midwest; the Great Plains are once again covered by a sea, as in prehistoric days," he told his rapidly dwindling listening audience. "Refugee shelters were established but the panic in recent days blocked the highways, and the massive distances involved were too great for most. Like those in most lowland plains areas, the people were trapped with no place to go."
Chalk one up for Reno, the little man thought smugly. No ocean was going to get between the Cascades and the Rockies, certainly not to this elevation.
He reached into his pocket for a cigarette, found an empty pack, and cursed under his breath. Funny, these people, he thought. Money was still important to them even when the world ended. He sighed, got up, and went over to the slot machine, then fumbled in his pockets. Finally his hand seized on a quarter, his last. He put it in the machine, pulled the handle, and didn't even bother to look at the spinning wheels. There was a chunk, chunk, chunk of tumblers falling into locked places; it came up three bars and clinked ten quarters into the little tray. He scooped them up mechanically, went over to the cigarette machine, and fed four of them in.
It suddenly occurred to him that he could have done that with the cigarette machine and nobody would have cared or noticed. Protective reaction, he decided. Never do the obvious.
. . estimate the asteroid will strike within the next seventy-two to eighty-four hours," the radio was saying. "It is believed that some will survive the impact, even those not at a tangent to the strike area or its opposite position. Your local Civil Defense units will be giving instructions on impact and post-impact procedures. Please pick up these instructions and associated equipment at local-disaster relief stations as soon as possible."
The little man chuckled. He knew the rules. The thing was being attracted to Earth like a bee to honey; it was on a dead-straight collision course, and it was picking up speed. There had been some talk that it might hit the Moon, but calculations quickly showed that a vain hope. Wouldn't have mattered, anyway, he knew. The rogue asteroid that was now looming in the sky, blocking heat and light and causing massive upheavals in the Earth, wasn't any bigger than the Moon, anyway. A direct hit on the satellite, forcing it into the Earth, would have the same effect as the asteroid's strike.
The worst part of it was that they'd done it to themselves. A little glitch, that was all. A huge, juicy, fat rogue asteroid, coming very close to Earth. What a nice chance! Go up, discover that it has tremendous mineral resources on it-a treasure house, they called it. Headed toward the sun in an ill-fated parabolic orbit that would bring it too close to the burning orb. It would have been incinerated, all that wealth a waste. How nice instead to take the challenge to make it a new satellite of Earth, far enough out so that it didn't do much harm, of course, but close enough to be easily and cheaply worked by the plundered Earth.
Just a few special kinds of superbombs planted here, a few others there, on the asteroid, a nicely timed and coordinated detonation, and it would miss the sun, whip around, and come back. More bombs to brake it and park it. Just so.
Just so.
Only all the bombs hadn't gone off. The special things had to be individually and carefully built, but there had been no way to field-test an individual bomb, only a design. And the values were too critical-no redundancy. They had shot their wad on it in their stupid optimism, and it hadn't worked. It wouldn't work. The initial explosions had gone fine, and the asteroid had whipped around the sun and was now on its way back at tremendous speed. Time to put on the brakes. Oops! No brakes? And the dumb bastards had actually gone into those bombs, to try to fire them manually!
Some of them did fire. Some, not all. Enough to point the damned thing straight at the Earth.
From an orbit a few million kilometers out, the gravitational effects would have been annoying but not serious-and slow. More than made up for by the riches of the place.
But now the thing was a bullet, and even though it raced at thousands of kilometers per hour to its target, it seemed to move in slow motion, like a bullet creeping toward someone in front of a firing squad.
It didn't matter now. Three, four days, the radio had said. Not true, he knew-and he knew that the people still around, the people in this bar even, didn't believe it, either. Hours. A day or two at most. The Earth had already started to wobble, to crack. There would be little left when the thing hit, anyway.
The barman wanted two bucks before he'd give him any more doubles. He sighed, got up, and went back over to the three lonely slot machines. He had six quarters, but he didn't need them. He put a quarter in the first one, and before it came up three oranges he had already put a quarter in the second one. By the time the third one was spinning, the second had come up three bells, and now the third one had three cherries.
He returned to the bar with a handful of quarters and plopped them down on top the bar. The barman had an almost stricken expression on his face; he shook his head incredulously and poured a double for the little man and one for himself.
Even the young couple seemed distracted by his little display. The machines rang an electric bell whenever a jackpot came up, and the din from all three going off within seconds of one another had been impossible to ignore.
He turned on his stool, looked straight at them, and smiled. Picking up his drink, he hopped off the stool and wandered over to their booth. "Might I join you for a moment?" he asked pleasantly.
They seemed to hesitate for a second, glancing first at him and then at each other, but both were also fascinated, and it was something that took their minds off the reality outside.
Jill McCulloch and Mac Walters shrugged at each other, and Mac said, "Why not? Have a seat?" He scooted over to allow the little man to sit next to him, opposite Jill.
The man looked something like a skid-row bum-tiny, frail, with an unkempt growth of gray beard and a stained suit that might really have been brown but was definitely slept in. He reeked of whiskey and stale cigarettes.
"You are from the University?" he asked them pleasantly in his slightly accented tones, his voice unslurred by the prodigious amounts of alcohol he'd been consuming.
Jill shook her head negatively. "Not me. I don't even know why I'm in this crazy city."
Mac nodded. "Same here." They introduced themselves by name.
The little man seemed pleased. "I am Asmodeus Mogart," he responded, then paused and pulled out a cigarette, ignoring Jill's obvious distaste for both the smoke and him. He looked at them seriously.