"Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

It was our one hundred and ninth year in the computer.
He was speaking for all of us.




Nimdok (which was the name the machine had forced him to use, because it liked to amuse itself
with strange sounds) hallucinated that there were canned goods in the ice caverns. Gorrister and I were very
dubious. “It’s another shuck,” I told them. “Like the goddam frozen elephant it sold us. Benny almost went
out of his mind over that one. We’ll hike all that way and it’ll be putrified or some damn thing. I say forget
it. Stay here; it’ll have to come up with something pretty soon or we’ll die.”
Benny shrugged. Three days it had been since we’d last eaten. Worms. Thick, ropey.
Nimdok was no more certain. He knew there was the chance, but he was getting thin. It couldn’t
be any worse there, than here. Colder, but that didn’t matter much. Hot, cold, raining, lava, boils or locust-it
never mattered: the machine masturbated and we had to take it or die.
Ellen decided us. “I’ve got to have something, Ted. Maybe there’ll be some Bartlett pears or
peaches. Please, Ted, let’s try it.”
I gave in easily. What the hell. Mattered not at all. Ellen was grateful, though. She took me twice
out of turn. Even that had ceased to matter. The machine giggled every time we did it. Loud, up there, back
there, all around us. And she never climaxed, so why bother.
We left on a Thursday. The machine always kept us up-to-date on the date. The passage of time
was important; not to us sure as hell, but to it. Thursday. Thanks.
Nimdok and Gorrister carried Ellen for a while, their hands locked to their own and each other’s
wrists, a seat. Benny and I walked before and after, just to make sure that if anything happened, it would
catch one of us and at least Ellen would be safe. Fat chance, safe. Didn’t matter.
It was only a hundred miles or so to the ice caverns, and on the second day, when we were lying
out under the blistering sun-thing it had materialized, it sent down some manna. Tasted like boiled boar
urine. We ate it.
On the third day we passed through a valley of obsolescence, filled with rusting carcasses of
ancient computer banks. AM had been as ruthless with his own life as with ours. It was a mark of his
personality: he strove for perfection. Whether it was a matter of killing off unproductive elements in his
own world-filling bulk, or perfecting methods for torturing us, AM was as thorough as those who had
invented him-now long since gone to dust-could ever have hoped.
There was light filtering down from above, and we realized we must be very near the surface. But
we didn’t try to crawl up to see. There was virtually nothing out there; had been nothing that could be
considered anything for over a hundred years. Only the blasted skin of what had once been the home of
billions. Now there were only the five of us, down here inside, alone with AM
I heard Ellen saying, frantically, “No, Benny! Don’t, come on, Benny, don’t please!”
And then I realized I had been hearing Benny murmuring, under his breath, for several minutes.
He was saying, “I’m gonna get out, I’m gonna get out...” over and over. His monkeylike face was crumbled
up in an expression of beatific delight and sadness, all at the same time. The radiation scars AM had given
him during the “festival” were drawn down into a mass of pink-white puckerings, and his features seemed
to work independently of one another. Perhaps Benny was the luckiest of the five of us: he had gone stark,
staring mad many years before.
But even though we could call AM any damned thing we liked, could think the foulest thoughts of
fused memory banks and corroded base plates, of burnt out circuits and shattered control bubbles, the
machine would not tolerate our trying to escape. Benny leaped away from me as I made a grab for him. He
scrambled up the face of a smaller memory cube, tilted on its side and filled with rotted components. He
squatted there for a moment, looking like the chimpanzee AM had intended him to resemble.
Then he leaped high, caught a trailing beam of pitted and corroded metal, and went up it, hand-