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

The strange thing is that nobody ever saw me do it, or if they did, they didn't
talk about it, but then most people don't realize that I'm really a very gentle
person, if you give me half a chance.
In a month or so, I was pretty sure that the trees were dead, what with the way
the bark was falling off, and after that I left them alone.
That had been six months ago and they were still out there, because the colonel
hadn't given any orders about them. Likely, he hadn't noticed.
My mark on the Air Force. Nine dead trees.
I carried my belongings to the garage outside of the gate and settled up with
the owner of the place.
Motorcycles weren't allowed on base. They had the wrong image by Air Force
standards, although they were allowed up at the Notch, since civilians weren't
allowed within sight of the place. They'd give you a sticker for one to let you
past the Elite Guard, through the gate, and to the small parking lot. From there
it was a short walk past more guards, past the thick steel blast doors, and into
the generator-packed tunnel that led deep into the hollowed out mountain.
I packed up, kick started her with one hand and rode off. I never put a foot on
the kick starter, my theory being that if hand cranking wouldn't do it, she
needed a tune up. Electric starters, of course, are for wimps.
I stopped a hundred yards outside the Westover Field gate and peeled the SAC
sticker from the Wixom Ranger faring on my BMW R-60. I no longer felt any hate.
I just didn't want it there, defacing my bike, now that I was free.
I had joined the Air Force for many reasons. Without the money to finish my
degree, I needed a trade, and they'd promised to teach me electronics, the one
promise they'd actually kept. Mostly, though, I'd wanted have some adventures
while I was still young, to spread my wings a little, and see a bit of the
world.
Instead, they'd stuffed me under a mountain for the duration.
More than anything else, I'd wanted to do something . . . significant. To do
something important for my country, and maybe even for the world.
But there's nothing glorious about fixing machinery, especially when the stuff
almost never broke down. Ninety percent of my actual work time had been spent
cleaning floors, dusting 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