"Alan Dean Foster - To The Vanishing Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

To The Vanishing Point
by Alan Dean Foster

To Cele Patterson, the angel of Peter Cooper with love and affection

1

DESOLATION IS MAGNIFIED at seventy miles per hour. At that speed,
colors that are normally separate and distinct tend to blend together like the
test pattern on an old TV. Sharply defined objects melt into one another,
precluding identification, forestalling recognition. Landscapes adopt the
illusion of reality.
It's worse in the desert because there is so little to focus on. Those
creatures that don't hide usually spend the daylight hours sleeping. For most
of the year the plant life is dressed in a blistered gray hue that seems
designed to confuse the eye. Nothing moves except the tormented air that rises
in waves from the frying-pan pavement in front of you.
In summer, when the thermometer in the Mojave creeps past the 110 mark
with threatening regularity, all activity ceases. Like the sidewinders and the
kangaroo rats, the desert's human inhabitants have gone to ground by eight
A.M., embracing the protection of dark buildings and overstressed air
conditioners.
Once you get out past Barstow, driving east, civilization vanishes for
hundreds of miles except for one tiny outpost called Baker. The map will
insist you're still in the United States of America, but if not for the
nondescript ribbon of concrete known as Interstate 40 you might as well be
crossing the Gobi, or the Sahara, or the Namib. Brothers in emptiness. Parts
of the Great Southwest Desert are as deadly empty as Arabia's Rub' al Khali.
If anything stands out it's the absence of black. Everything is painted
light or white. In the Mojave black is the color of fools; sometimes dead
ones. Now and again travelers convinced that living in the twentieth century
has endowed them with immunity break down out in the desert. Travelers
neglectful of water. Transient visitors who perish of dehydration despite
aerial surveillance and thermos bottles and air-conditioning and CB radios.
Dull the desert can be, but it slays the thoughtless and carefree as
efficiently as any gilded Toledo blade. Indifference makes it no less lethal.
The Sonderbergs had no thoughts of dying, though there were times since
they'd left Los Angeles when Frank thought of doing some killing of his own,
if only in the metaphorical sense. It was his own fault and he knew it.
Normally they flew to Las Vegas. He'd decided they'd do it differently this
time. Among the things that had inspired this changeling journey was the fact
that Wendy was now old enough to appreciate the beauty of their unspoiled
surroundings. That she had not the slightest intention of doing so was no
fault of his. He ought to have known better.
Straightening slightly in the captain's chair enabled him to see her in
the rearview mirror. Sixteen and pretty, she was convulsing on the couch that
folded out to make a bed. Her head snapped from side to side, her torso
twitched violently at the waist, and her feet massaged the floor. Eyes shut in
private rapture, she was moving to the electrified rhythm of an
unpronounceable group of heavy-metal leprechauns, delivered exclusively to her