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

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



file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20...ard%207%20-%20Conrad's%20Time%20Machine.txt (4 of 156) [12/28/2004 4:51:10 PM]
 file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20E-books/Leo%20Frankowski%20-%20Stargard%207%20-%20Conrad's%20Time%20Machine.txt

couldn't see keeping it.
I really didn't knowwhat 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 naturally
pointed west, which was fine. There isn't much east of Massachusetts that you
can get to on a bike.
Well. My motorcycle was paid for. My savings and accumulated leave added up to
just under $2,000.00. It was springtime and figured I could live for six months
without the need to reconnect myself to society. Then, maybe I'd go back and
finish my degree. Or maybe not.
The Mass Pike dumped me onto the New York Thruway and a green-and-white sign
read "Rochester—231 Miles."
That got me thinking about Jim Hasenpfeffer, since he was working on his Ph.D.
at the University of Rochester and this naturally got me thinking about Ian
McTavish as well.
CHAPTER TWO
An Old Friend
Actually, we never did have much in common.
Take religion.
Now, I was a defrocked altar boy whose convictions varied between my normal
atheism to militant Agnosticism when I'm argued into a corner. Militant
agnostics say that they don't know anything about God,and you don't either,
dammit !
Ian was sort of conventional about religion. He always went to church on Sunday,
but he never much talked about it. I think he was about the only Christian I'd
ever met who was capable of being polite about religion. Or at least he was
always annoyingly polite with me.
And nobody ever had the slightest idea of what—if anything—Hasenpfeffer believed
in. He had this talent for sidestepping whatever he felt wouldn't be personally
rewarding.