"Harrison, Harry - Make Room Make Room" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

colonials. Its trees were burned decades ago, its hills leveled and the fresh ponds drained and filled,
while the crystal springs have been imprisoned underground and spill their pure waters directly into
the sewers. Reaching out urbanizing tentacles from its island home, the city has become a
megalopolis with four of its five boroughs blanketing half of one island over a hundred miles long,
engulfing another island, and sprawling up the Hudson River onto the mainland of North America.
The fifth and original borough is Manhattan: a slab of primordial granite and metamorphic rock
bounded on all sides by water, squatting like a steel and stone spider in the midst of its web of
bridges, tunnels, tubes, cables and ferries. Unable to expand outward, Manhattan has writhed upward,
feeding on its own flesh as it tears down the old buildings to replace them with the new, rising higher
and still higher -- yet never high enough, for there seems to be no limit to the people crowding here.
They press in from the outside and raise their families, and their children and their children's children
raise families, until this city is populated as no other city has ever been in the history of the world.
On this hot day in August in the year 1999 there are -- give or take a few thousand -- thirty-five
million people in the City of New York.
PART ONE
1
The August sun struck in through the open window and burned on Andrew Rusch's bare legs until
discomfort dragged him awake from the depths of heavy sleep. Only slowly did he become aware of
the heat and the damp and gritty sheet beneath his body. He rubbed at his gummed-shut eyelids, then
lay there, staring up at the cracked and stained plaster of the ceiling, only half awake and
experiencing a feeling of dislocation, not knowing in those first waking moments just where he was,
although he had lived in this room for over seven years. He yawned and the odd sensation slipped
away while he groped for the watch that he always put on the chair next to the bed, then he yawned
again as he blinked at the hands mistily seen behind the scratched crystal. Seven... seven o'clock in
the morning, and there was a little number 9 in the middle of the square window. Monday, the ninth
of August, 1999 -- and hot as a furnace already, with the city still imbedded in the heat wave that had
baked and suffocated New York for the past ten days. Andy scratched at a trickle of perspiration on
his side, then moved his legs out of the patch of sunlight and bunched the pillow up under his neck.
From the other side of the thin partition that divided the room in half there came a clanking whir that
quickly rose to a high-pitched drone.
"Morning..." he shouted over the sound, then began coughing. Still coughing he reluctantly stood and
crossed the room to draw a glass of water from the wall tank; it came out in a thin, brownish trickle.
He swallowed it, then rapped the dial on the tank with his knuckles and the needle bobbed up and
down close to the Empty mark. It needed filling, he would have to see to that before he signed in at
four o'clock at the precinct. The day had begun.
A full-length mirror with a crack running down it was fixed to the front of the hulking wardrobe and
he poked his face close to it, rubbing at his bristly jaw. He would have to shave before he went in. No
one should ever look at himself in the morning, naked and revealed, he decided with distaste,
frowning at the dead white of his skin and the slight bow to his legs that was usually concealed by his
pants. And how did he manage to have ribs that stuck out like those of a starved horse, as well as a
growing potbelly -- both at the same time? He kneaded the soft flesh and thought that it must be the
starchy diet, that and sitting around on his chunk most of the time. But at least the fat wasn't showing
on his face. His forehead was a little higher each year, but wasn't too obvious as long as his hair was
cropped short. You have just turned thirty, he thought to himself, and the wrinkles are already
starting around your eyes. And your nose is too big -- wasn't it Uncle Brian who always said that was
because there was Welsh blood in the family? And your canine teeth are a little too obvious so when
you smile you look a bit like a hyena. You're a handsome devil, Andy Rusch, and when was the last
time you had a date? He scowled at himself, then went to look for a handkerchief to blow his
impressive Welsh nose.
There was just a single pair of clean undershorts in the drawer and he pulled them on; that was