"Frankowski,.Leo.-.Conrad.Starguard.7.-.Conrad's.Time.Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

equipment, and trying to look busy. Most of the rest of it was spent
filling out paperwork, an occupation that took six times longer that
the actual repair work did.

Mostly, I just sat there at a grey metal desk. The lighting was cool,
efficient fluorescent. The temperature was kept at a constant 70.4
degrees fahrenheit. The relative humidity was at 48.6 percent The
floors and ceilings were white. The walls were beige. The
equipment was a uniform dove grey, with small, unblinking colored
lights.

The silence was deafening.

You sat there for eight hours every day, forbidden to read anything
but technical manuals, staring at the walls and waiting for someone
up in the cab to tell the heavy bombers and all the land-based
missiles to go and blow up the world.

Off duty, you drank a lot, but it didn't help all that much.

My outfit had a suicide rate that was higher than the casualty rate of
most combat outfits in time of war. And it wasn't just the young kids
who "took the pipe." Old, balding sergeants would somehow get
sort of listless, and then you'd hear, unofficially, that they'd put a
bullet behind their ear. You never heard a word officially, of course,
not even a notification of the funeral service. It didn't fit the public
image the Air Force wanted everybody to believe in.

Soon, you learned to hate the bastards.

The hate I'd felt for years for the organization that had kept me in
useless bondage had become a bigger part of my life than I had
imagined, and now that those bonds were finally parted, I was left
with a vast hollowness inside of me.

I'd sold off almost everything I owned except my camping gear.
Even my uniforms were gone, which wasn't precisely legal since I
was still supposed to be a member of the inactive reserves. But I
didn't have any family or anyplace to send that junk for storage, so
if I couldn't fit it into my saddlebags, I couldn't see keeping it.

I really didn't know what I wanted, but I had a strong handle on
some negatives. Like I never wanted to see another officer again
in my life. Mostly, I needed to get way far away from petty rules and
silly regulations and people who outranked me, which in the Air
Force was just about everybody.

I wasn't the kind who got promoted.

My BMW sort of automatically took me to the Mass Pike and just as