"Joe Haldeman - The Coming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

THE COMING
Joe Haldeman

[02 jun 2002—scanned and proofed for #bookz]

This book is for two guys who live a thousand miles apart and have never met: Ricky and Rusty.
Both, by coincidence, were marines in the Pacific in World War II.
Ricky is Ottone Riccio, poet and prophet and rascal. Every teacher needs a teacher like him.
Rusty is James Hevelin, who is never called James except by the government. He is the friend every
man needs and not many find.
In some world everyone has a Ricky on his left and a Rusty on his right, and it's a good world.
The author gratefully acknowledges the influence of James Gunn's beautiful novel, The
Listeners, on this book.


October first
Professor Bell
Reporters.
Normally her desk was no neater than it had to be, a comfortable random pile of notes, journals,
and books. So long as she knew where everything was, who cared? But she had just spent fifteen
minutes nervously straightening things up, desk and worktable. It was not quite six in the morning.
There would be reporters.
She looked at the coffee machine in the anteroom. The smell was a magnet. No, not now. Her heart
was already racing. Doctor said two cups a day.
She pushed a button on the desk. "Previous," she said, and the diagram on the wallscreen was
replaced by a double page of equations and numbers. "Previous," she said again, and got a double page
of numbers and words. "Left." The screen reconfigured and gave her a single magnified page of words.
She stared at it and shook her head.
It was an old and old-fashioned office, dating from before the turn of the century. It had an antique
blackboard that she enjoyed using, the only one left in the physics building, and one whole wall, floor to
ceiling, had built-in shelves for books printed on paper. Some of that space had been converted into a
large display screen, but she did have rows of paper volumes bound in leather, cloth, and cardboard. The
head of the department can be eccentric.
"Music," she said; "random Vivaldi, then random Baroque." An oboe began a familiar figure.
"Louder, ten percent."
She sat down for a minute, listening, and then got up and slid a large book from the shelf, one she'd
bought on impulse Monday. She leafed through the yellowing pages carefully. It was a book of news
photographs from the old Life magazine, documenting a war that her great-great-grandfather had fought
in. Grainy patriotic pictures and ads with meaningless prices. Lucky Strike Green Has Gone to War.
What on Earth did that mean? Lucky Strike was evidently a tobacco cigarette; maybe green tobacco had
some weapons application back then.
At the sound of the elevator, she closed the book and returned it. Her husband came into the outer
office. "Coffee any good?"
"Just made it, half-real." He poured a cup. White stubble on his chin, rumpled workclothes. He got
up almost as early as she did, but didn't bother to shave and dress till noon.
"I didn't quite understand your message." He sat down on the chair normally reserved for nervous
graduate students. "Or quite believe what I heard." She always expected to get the house when she
called home. Norman was a cellist and composer, and spent the first hour of his workday warming up,
meditating over scales and intervals, and ignored the phone. But the house had told him it sounded
important, and so he picked up the message. He'd called back immediately and said he was coming over.