"Gordon R. Dickson - The Pritcher Mass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

now rough with clumps of aspen saplings and the occasional
splash of deadly color from the golden fruit of a Job's-berry
bush.
He craned his neck, trying to see up along the track
forward; but at this spot it curved to the left through a stand
of pines and there was nothing to be seen that way, either,
but the trees and the bulging windowed right side of the
Special's first car.
"Sabotage," said the thin woman in the harness to Chaz'
immediate left. Her face was pale except for small spots of
color over her prominent cheekbones; and her voice was
tight. "It's always on an evening run like this. The rails are
going to be torn up ahead. Our seal will get cracked,
somehow; and they'll never let us back into the Dells…"
She closed her eyes and began moving her lips in some
silent prayer, or ritual of comfort. She looked to be in her late
thirties or early forties—pretty once, but time had been hard
on her. The atmosphere in the ear stayed noisy with
speculations. After a minute, however, the train jerked and
started again, slowly gathering speed. As the car Chaz was in
went around the curve and emerged from the trees he got a
clear view of what had halted it, spilled on the roadbed to the
right of the steel tracks, less than twenty feet beyond the
window and himself.
The saboteur had been a man in his mid-fifties, very thin,
wearing only the cut-off trouser lower half of a jumpsuit, with
a thick red knit sweater. He had apparently found an old
railway speedcart somewhere—a real antique, probably from
some infested museum. The little vehicle was nothing more
than a platform and motor mounted on railcar wheels. This
had been loaded with a number of brown cardboard cartons,
possibly containing explosives. With these, he had apparently
tried to ram the train head on.
What they had heard must have been two solid-missile
shots from the computer-directed, seventy-five-millimeter
Peace cannon on the first car. One shot had missed. There
was a fresh-torn hole in the ground, five feet to the right of
the tracks. The other had knocked the wheels off one side of
the speedcart, and thrown cart, rider, and cargo off the tracks.
If there had been explosives in the cartons, they had not gone
off—probably stale. Concussion, or something like it, must
have killed the saboteur himself; because there was not a
mark on him although he seemed obviously dead—his open
eyes staring up at the red sunset stains in the haze-thick sky,
as he lay sprawled on his back by the shattered speedcart.
He was brown-skinned and emaciated with the red spots of
ulcers on his throat. Plainly in the last stages of Job's-berry
rot …
There was a long-drawn shudder of breath from the woman
in the harness at Chaz' left. He glanced at her and saw that