"David Gerrold - Starsiders 2 - Bouncing off the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

times. Douglas had told me more than once that it was my fault Stinky was the way he was. He said I'd
resented him from the day he was born. But that wasn't true. I'd resented him long before that. It was
Stinky's fault Mom and Dad got divorced. He'd been an accident, and Mom got angry at Dad, and Dad
got angry at Mom, and then he moved out or she threw him out, it didn't matter-but if Stinky hadn't come
along, we'd still be a family. Or maybe not. But at least things would have been quieter. After he was
born, Mom was different. She didn't have time for me anymore. She didn't have time for anything.
Everything was about Stinky, and I had to help take care of him too, instead of just getting to be a kid.
So of course, I was angry at him. And now, both Mom and Dad were gone, and the only person poor
Stinky had to hang on to was me. I suppose, if I thought about it, I didn't really hate him. I just wished
he'd never been born.

TAKING AWAY TWO WEEKS AGO.

TAKING AWAY TWO WEEKS AGO, WE'D BEEN in West El Paso-just another tube-town for
"flow-through" families. Which is a polite way of saying "poor people ." The way it worked, they laid
down a bunch of tubes, three or four meters in diameter, sealed the ends, and let people move in. They
called it no-fab housing. The best that can be said about living in a tube is that it's almost as good as not
having anyplace to live at all. El Paso gets sandstorms, big ones, and when the wind blows it turns the
tubes into giant organ pipes. Everything vibrates. You get really deep bass, well below the range of
audibility, four cycles a second-you don't hear it, you feel it. Only you don't really know what you're
feeling, you just get this queasy feeling. Burying the tubes doesn't help. They bury themselves anyway, as
the sand settles around them. Tube-towns sink into the ground sometimes as fast as a meter a year. The
Earth just sucks them in. So they just keep adding more and more tubes on top. Our tube-town was
already five layers deep. You're supposed to get air and sunlight through these big vertical
chimneys-more tubes-only that creates another problem. The wind sweeps down one chimney and up
the other, making the whole house whistle. The harmonics are dreadful. And there isn't a whole lot
anybody can do about it either, except
leave. The Tube Authority told us we could move out anytime. There were plenty families on the waiting
list to move in. So when Dad said, "Let's go to the moon," well-it really did seem like a good idea at the
time, once we realized he was serious. I don't think Douglas and Bobby believed him any more than I
did, at least not at first, but hell-if it would get us out of the tubes, even for a couple of weeks, we were
all for it. "Sure, Dad. Let's go to the moon." I figured Barringer Meteor Crater was as far as we were
ever going to get, especially after Stinky's little misadventure. But Dad was more than serious. He was
actually determined. He'd already made plans. He'd hired himself out as a courier and gotten tickets up
the beanstalk for all four of us. All we had to do was secure a bid from a colony and we'd be outbound
on the next brightliner to the stars. Just one little problem.... I mean, other than Mom. There was this big
storm, Hurricane Charles-and no, I did not appreciate the honor of having a hurricane named after me-it
had pretty much clobbered Terminus City at the bottom of the beanstalk, so all groundside traffic was
shut down, no one knew for how long. So we couldn't go back, even if we wanted to-which we
didn't-because while we were all fighting with each other in Judge Griffith's courtroom , the United
Nations declared a Global Health Emergency. That was the other reason why Dad wanted to get off the
planet so badly. He'd figured it out, just from watching the news; it wasn't hard, but most people weren't
paying attention to that stuff. By the time most people knew, the plagues were already out of control.
While we were boarding the first elevator up the beanstalk, the Centers for Disease Control was
announcing-admitting-that yes, the numbers did suggest the possibility that maybe, yes, we could be
seeing -but there's really no need for anyone to panic, if we all take proper precautions-the first stages of
a full-blown pandemic-um, yes, on three continents, but all this speculation about a global population
crash is dangerous and premature- And about twenty seconds after that, the international stock market
imploded. More than a hundred trillion dollars disappeared into the bit bucket. Evaporated instantly. So
even if there wasn't any real danger , there wasn't any money anymore to deal with it. And that was a real