"George Alec Effinger - The Nick of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

target point. He waited while the voice of the project's control counted down the seconds. At T minus
zero there was a flicker of amber light, a sizzle, a snap, and a moderate clap of thunder. Mihalik was
gone. He had plummeted into the past.
 He was now sitting in a darkened room. He knew immediately that it was no longer 1996. He
wondered where he was -- rather, when he was. He would still be in New York City, of course. He
stood up, a crooked smile on his handsome face. He ran a hand through his mildly rumpled hair, made
sure his fly was zipped, and felt his way across the room toward a door that leaked a thin line of light at
the bottom.
Outside it was summer. In 1996 it had been February, cold and bleak; here it was warm and bright,
the sky partly cloudy, the temperature in the mid-eighties, the humidity somewhere around 40 percent.
There was a large crowd of people outside, and they were wandering from one building to another; it
seemed to Mihalik that he was in some kind of exhibition. The people carried maps, and the parents
among them struggled to control their small children, all of whom wanted to run off in directions other
than straight ahead. Mihalik walked close to a young couple with a baby in a stroller. He looked at the
book the man was carrying: Official Guide Book -- New York World's Fair 1939, For Peace and
Freedom.
The building Mihalik came out of was the Hall of Industry and Metals. He walked along the avenue,
marveling at the past and the peace and quiet and brotherhood and Christian fellowship everyone
showed toward his or her neighbors. There were no fights on the sidewalk. There were no vagrants, no
troublemakers, no drug dealers or prostitutes. There were only happy families and corporate exhibits.
This was the golden past, an era of innocent bliss, of concern for the rights of individuals and respect for
private property. Mihalik was grateful for the opportunity to escape the mad world of 1996 to spend a
little time in this more humane place. He would return to the present refreshed, and he would be able to
help his own world identify the essential problems that created jealousy and mistrust among people.
Mihalik was not unaware of the weight of responsibility he carried; he had been charged with the duty of
returning to 1996 with some token of what society had lost in the intervening sixty years.
Mihalik walked toward a great white needle and a great white globe. He had seen pictures of these
structures: the Trylon and Perisphere. They were located at the Fair's Theme Center, and Mihalik had a
feeling they represented something important. His first task, as he began to orient himself in the world of
1939, was to find out just what these two imposing symbols meant to the people of his grandparents’
generation. He stopped a young woman and spoke to her; she looked at his unusual costume -- he was
wearing the thin, olive green one-piece garment of 1996 -- and assumed he was one of the Fair's
employees. “What do these marvelous buildings mean to you?” he asked.
“The Trylon?” she said. “The Trylon is a symbol of man's upward yearnings, pointing into the sky
where dwell all hope and ambitions.”
“That's just what I was thinking,” said Mihalik.
“And the Perisphere, well, the Perisphere is the promise of Democracity, you know.”
“Democracity?” asked Mihalik.
“You walk into that big bowl and spread out before you is a model of the city of the future. Have you
ever seen a city of the future?”
“Yes,” said Mihalik, “on numerous occasions.”
“Most cities of the future are too conservative, I feel,” said the young woman. “We need monorails.
We need aerial bridges linking cloud-piercing office buildings and apartment towers. We need parks
where slums now blight the boroughs. We need fourteen-lane highways that parallel new sparkling
waterways. We need shopping and recreation centers where citizens may spend their newly won leisure
and newly earned wealth. We need bright, airy schools where young minds may learn to value the gift of
life that has been given them. All this lies within the Perisphere -- a dream of times to come, a vision of
the New York City that will exist in our children's lifetime in this place. The Perisphere is a ringing
challenge, a concretalization of our hope and ambitions as symbolized by the Trylon, drawn down to
earth and made manifest for our inspection. It is a kind of miracle.”