"Hutchinson, Dave - Tir-na-nOg" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

"We'll sweep another quadrant tomorrow." Good Christ, how long has she been standing there?

"I don't think he's still here," I say nonchalantly, as if I haven't just had the wits scared out of me. "If he was here in the first place."

"We'll sweep another quadrant tomorrow," she repeats, putting the scanner back into its fitted chamois cover. The scanner is just one of the things on this trip which have disappointed Benedict, myself being another. Properly calibrated, it should in theory be able to pick up the radiation from the remains of Sellafield, miles to the south and west, but Hey's battery is nowhere to be found.

The scanner looks just like one of Mr Spock's tricorders. When I mentioned this to Benedict all she did was look at me with an expression of gentle pity, the kind of look I always imagine nineteenth-century missionaries giving to South Sea Islanders. She's too young to remember the original Star Trek, of course. Too young to remember moving pictures in less than three dimensions, come to that. I shouldn't blame her.

I look at the sky and say, "Beam me up, Scotty."

"You're sick, Monkey," she says, shaking her head.

We follow the burn back down the valley towards the loch. There's a tree up here, near the tree line, that I noticed on our last ramble. I call it the Cancer Tree. It seems to be dying a long and dreadful death. Huge granular cankers the size of fists are clustered on the trunk in a nearly symmetrical pattern; it has almost no leaves, even allowing for the lateness of the season, and it seems to be shedding branches as well, because several have simply fallen off and splashed down into the burn. I pointed it out the first time I saw it, but Benedict only gave it a cursory glance and said something about pollution, said Oregon had been hit by it. I don't think Benedict likes trees. I'm not entirely sure she likes people. Certainly she doesn't like me.

Just beyond the Cancer Tree, Benedict catches her toe on a stone half-buried in the grass and goes flying. It looks as if she bumps her knee quite painfully, but I just stand where I am and stare impassively, hoping to make her angry. I haven't seen Benedict angry yet; it ought to be quite instructive.

All she does, however, is pick herself up and glare at me before stomping off down the hill path again. Or rather, she glares at the two-centimeter CD-ROM I wear, as my one concession to contemporary fashion, pinned to the breast-pocket flap of my combat jacket. I have not told her yet that the jacket is older than she is. I'm saving that for a special occasion.




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I was doing the audiovisual thing with a fifth-year European History group when the creature with the surfer's tan arrived. It met me in the Head's office with sun-bleached hair, a suit from the Armani Revival, and the soft mid-Atlantic language of corporate law. It wanted my help.

Or rather its employers wanted my help. An important piece of corporate research equipment had gone missing, and it was thought that I might be able to help get it back. The lawyer wouldn't tell me what the piece of equipment was, just then, but he said he was authorized to offer me a payment in return for my services, whether it was recovered or not. He offered me a choice of currencies. It worked out at eight or ten times my annual salary.

Well, all kinds of moral considerations go through your mind in a situation like that. After you've checked out the corporation in question and found it isn't all some outlandish prank, you start to weigh the cramped flat in Walthamstow against the previously hypothetical three-bedroom house in Hertfordshire. Improbably, the light at the end of the tunnel has begun to shine on you. So you sign where they tell you, in quintuplicate, because even if you can't see what possible use you can be, it doesn't matter. They're going to pay you anyway.…

And then of course they tell you what the missing piece of equipment is, that it has fair hair, a Midlands accent just like your own, and used to tell the worst Irishman jokes in London. And by then it's too late. You're a victim of your own greed.




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The hotel's septic tank has a circular iron inspection cover, half a meter or so across and held down by two dozen hex-head bolts. It pokes up out of the ground in the back garden on top of a section of pipe about a foot high. Years ago, on those school trips, I used to like to come out here and sit on the cover and look down the valley. I came out here the afternoon Benedict and I arrived, when I was still fitting the place and my memories of it back together. Benedict took one look at the septic tank, murmured something about "Third-World technology,"and sneered at the little methane converter bolted to the inspection pipe. I come out here a lot, which suits Benedict because she always knows where to find me.
The hotel is so solidly granite-built that it looks as if it's been carved out of the hillside. As does the owner, Mrs. Lamond. There is a Mr. Lamond, a small dark-skinned creature, but he only appears after nightfall, when he can be found on a tall stool in the bar, nursing one glass of single malt all evening. His wife, however, sweeps through the rooms and along the dark flock-wallpapered corridors with all the top-heavy grandeur of a galleon under full sail. She speaks a dialect which Benedict cannot decipher. Neither can I, for that matter, but I'm not about to let Benedict know that. When Mrs. Lamond speaks to me I nod in what seem to be the right places and hope for the best.

There is still a little room called the Television Room, where in the evenings we sit with the four or five other guests around an out-of-date Panasonic Holostar which has pronounced z-axis creep, so that all the figures seem to be fading in from some higher dimension. Benedict insists that we watch the news programs in case I spot something which might offer a clue to Hey's whereabouts, but all we see are reports of restless children looting and burning the hearts of Northern towns.

I phone my wife every evening after the news, and every evening she asks when I'm coming home. And every evening I give her the answer Benedict gives me when I ask the same question. I'll be home when we find Hey. And every evening, behind my wife's voice, I hear that hollow silence of abandonment.




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