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

"If there's a place to pull over up ahead, I'll do it," I told him. "We can talk things over."
"I'd just love to get out and stretch my legs," Susan groaned. "Seems like we've been driving for ages."
"Those were unusually long routes between portals," I said. "Wonder why?"
"Judging from the gravity," Roland put in, "and the apparent distance to the horizon, I'd say both
Snowball and this place are big, low density planets: Maybe portals have to be positioned so as to
balance out the planet's mass." He shrugged, looking over at me. "Just a wild guess."
"Maybe," I said. "I've been doing a lot of thinking about portals lately ... the Skyway, the cylinders, how
the whole system works. Never really gave it much thought before."
"Everyone takes the Skyway for granted," John said. "Simply part of the landscape."
"We can't be so complacent," Roland said ruefully. "Right," I agreed.
"If I never see this damn road again. .." Susan grumbled, shaking her head.
"I'm in sympathy with that," John said. "I think we're all road-weary at this point." He chuckled. "Except
for Jake, perhaps. Do starriggers ever get tired of traveling, Jake?"
"You bet-but after a few years, you just get numb. Most of the time, though, I like it. I like the road."
The commit markers were coming up. Here, they were just white-painted metal posts on either side of
the roadway. The Roadbuilders hadn't put them there-it was up to local inhabitants to mark the point
beyond which it was unsafe to stop. Back in Terran Maze, and in most mazes I'd been in, the markers
were more elaborate-flashing lights, holograms, and such.
I checked over the instruments. Everything looked fine. And just as I shifted my eyes to check the yellow
warning tag, it began flashing red.
"Jake," Sam said quietly.
"I see it. Too late to stop. Damn." "What a time for it."
"Trouble, Jake?" John wanted to know. "A little. We'll be okay, though."
I hoped fervently. The flashing red didn't mean the roller was going sugar on us-suffering an instantaneous
crystallization that could turn the supertraction tread into white congealed powder-but it did mean it could
go at any moment. Maybe now, maybe two days from now; there was no way to predict.
We were past the commit markers and racing for the first pair of cylinders. The safe corridor, a narrow
land bounded by two solid white lines, rolled out at us. Cross over either of those lines and you've had it.
The rig shuddered and groaned, caught in the delicately balanced gravitational. stresses around us.
"Keep her steady, Jake," Sam warned, "and be ready for a sudden jump to the right."
The rig shook and buffeted us in our seats.
"This is a rough one," Sam commented. "Just our luck." I felt the tug of an unseen hand, dragging the rig
to the left. I corrected, and suddenly the hand let go, sending us precipitously in the opposite direction.
But I was a veteran at this; I hadn't overcorrected, overreacted. This portal was a bit hairy, but I had
seen worse. If only the roller would hold.
The cylinders marched by, a stately procession of dark monuments. Between them-1 knew but couldn't
look-the view of the terrain was refracted into crazy, funhouse-mirror images, work of the powerful
gravitational fields.
Ahead was the aperture itself, a fuzzy patch of nothingness straddling the road. We shot straight into it.
?2

We got through.
The ailing roller was still intact, but the flashing red warning stayed on. I shut off the holo array. Then I
lowered our speed to 50 km/hr, took my crash helmet down from the rack behind the seat and put it on.
I rarely wear it, though I should. The bulky thing is more than a safety helmet; it has submicron chips in it
for just about everything-CPUs, communications, shortrange scanning, even encephalo-teleoperator
circuitry, though I never did buy the rest of the hookup. i prefer to operate machinery hands-on. The
thought of just sitting there, steering the rig on a whim and an alpha wave, makes me a little nervous.
We had arrived on a world that didn't look much like Winnie's jungle home, and I was beginning to think
that her Itinerary Poem contained some misinformation, until the Skyway plunged from the high plateau