"John DeChancie - Skyway 2 - Red Limit Freeway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dechancie John)

with the rest of the load."
"Oh, get folded."
"Think I don't know what that means? Should be ashamed of yourself."
"Punk you!"
"Such language! And from. a mere slip of a girl, too."
I had insisted that Lori be strapped to my bunk during portal transitions. She'd taken a nasty whack on
the head back on Splash, during our escape from the ship-seamonster Laputa.-I wanted to take no
chances; shooting an aperture can be rough sometimes, and it wasn't: at all clear whether Lori was
completely all right. She had been complaining of headaches. Normal enough, but I wanted to be sure.
She needed to be looked over. However, we had to leave Splash in a hurry, and the next planet up,
Snowball, lived up to its name. No one and practically no thing lived there. We were now on what
Winnie's Itinerary Poem called "The Land of Nothing to See" (per Darla's translation). You called it,
Winnie. The planet-or this part of it-looked like the old photographs of Mars I used to pore over as a
kid, a place of vast rock-strewn plains with sand sifted in between the rubble, kilometer after endless
kilometer of it. Except the sand was a crappy gray-green instead of an alluring, alien red. But there were
beings here. Probably humans, if the occasional mail-order pop-up domes far off the road were any
indication.
These were the Consolidated Outworlds, a maze of planets linked by the Skyway, but with no way back
to Terran Maze. No way home.
But I wasn't thinking of that just then. One of my pesky hologram readouts was blinking yellow. "What
the hell's that, Sam?"
"It's that damn left-front roller, Jake. We get a yellow every time we go into portal-approach mode. Been
getting one for, oh, couple of months now. You'd know that if you'd deign to take a look at your
instruments once in a while."
"I didn't notice it. You're right, I fly by the seat of my pants a little too much. Think we should stop?"
"The book says we should."
I looked out over the bleak terrain. "And do what?"
"I'm only telling you what the book says."
"Well, we'll have to risk it. It's done okay up to now."
"Fine. But if she goes sugar-doughnut on us while we're shooting a portal, don't say I-"
"-didn't warn you," I finished. "Right, Sam, you're covered."
"It's all the same to me, you know. I'm already dead."
The road ahead was a black ribbon leading straight through the cylinders. They towered above, their
tops festooned in wispy clouds against a greenish sky. Their color was black, utterly black, their surfaces
sucked clean of light. It almost hurt to look at them directly; not just physically, but philosophically. To
gaze upon an Absolute is discomforting. We're too used to fudging, finding refuge in the interstices of
things, content to see the universe in shades of gray. You could see all sorts of frightening possibilities in
that categorical darkness, if you stopped to look and think.
One thing you don't want to do is stop and philosophize near a portal. You might achieve a total and very
unpleasant oneness with your object of contemplation.
"Darla, what's Winnie's description of the next planet up?"
"Um. . . 'A Land Like Home; but It Isn't.' I think."
"Does that mean jungle? Yeah, well, I guess so," I answered myself. "I just hope there's some kind of
civilization. I want Lori to get checked out."
"Does Lori know anything about this part of the Outworlds?" John asked.
"No;" Darla said. "She told me she hasn't seen much besides her home planet and Splash."
"Well," I said, "she won't have too much trouble getting back to Splash, if she wants to go. Unless this is
a potluck portal." I looked at the rearview monitor. Traffic was still behind us. "But I can't believe all
these people are following us into oblivion. This portal must go somewhere."
"We'll all have some decisions to make about where we're going," John said. "Once we stop."