"Philip Jose Farmer - Dayworld rebel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

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He turned around. He groaned. The cylinder might have leaned over from the impact of his feet, but
it had not been. enough. It stood upright, not showing in the slightest that it had been
disturbed.
He rose slowly. The lower part of his back felt as if it were about to have a spasm. If that
happened, he was done for. Forget the plan. Say good-bye to all hope.
He walked swiftly to the bathroom and ran cold water into a glass. Having drunk that, he walked
just as swiftly to Thursday's cylinder. With a mighty effort that took him five minutes, he
rotated the cylinder away from the wall and at an angle toward the one by the window. When he had
it lined up with that stoner, he rested a minute. Four minutes left before the island came alive.
Friday's cylinder took another five minutes to get to the exact place where Wednesday's had been.
Now he had three cylinders


in a line. One near the wall. One halfway across the room. One a few feet from the window.
The labors of Hercules were nothing compared to mine, he thought. And the ancient strong man had a
lot more muscle and a lot more time to get his work done.
The pain in his back told him that he might not have any time left. It was now one minute past
time for destoning for Wednesday. He was behind schedule. This was, however, no time to push his
body. Like it or not, failing or succeeding, he had to repair the damage. Slowly, he eased down on
hands and knees while the back muscles quivered and burned. When he was on his back and was
staring at the ceiling, his-legs stretched out, he closed his eyes. Immediately, he went into the
state of mind he called SEARCH. He had been training himself so long in this procedure, five to
ten minutes at a time, two hours at others, any spare time he had (or so his memory told him),
that he had only to think out the code letters. They hung in his mind like curiously shaped comets
in a dark sky. When the last of the nine digits were there, he felt himself sliding down, down,
shooting in and out, turning sharp bends in his body. It was like riding down a convoluted and
murky tunnel, a safety chute.
Then he was flying through more darkness, but somewhere
• below him were enormous dully glowing blocks. His back musdes.
No time today to do more than say hello to the latissimus dorsi, the lumbar fascia, the serratus
posterior inferior, the rhomboideus major, the infraspinatus, and all their close allies and
friends.
Pain, hot and savage, struck him across the lower part of his back. It lasted for a half-second
and was gone. Sweating even more, he rose. His muscles, for the moment at least, were in superb
condition, violin strings ready to pour forth the music of Beethoven or his favorite composer,
Tudi Swanson Kai.
His room was quiet. In other rooms in this building and in thousands of other rooms throughout the
city, there would be noise. People,just destoned, getting ready for Wednesday, their


seventh part of the week. Many of them would at once go to bed to sleep under the influence of the
morpheus machine before rising to get ready for whatever time their work shifts started. In this
building, the first shift would be sitting down to eat. Some of them would breakfast in front of
their monitors, eating and at the same time watching the prisoners. His room would be unmonitored.