"Brian Lumley - Necroscope 7 - The Last Aerie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lumley Brian)

glanced at the building across the street, craning his neck 'ecologically aware'; or as she herself was wont to put it,
to peer up at the high windows of E-Branch. Up there he she was 'as one with the Earth'. When water tables
expected to see a light - just one, burning in a window set declined and deserts expanded, so her skin dried out,
centrally in the length of the entire upper storey which became desiccated. When acid rains ate into Scandinavian
was the Branch - lighting the room which housed the forests, her dandruff fell like snow. In her dreams she
Duty Officer through his lonely night vigil. Well, he saw heard whale species singing sadly of their decline and
the Duty Officer's light, right enough, and keeping it inevitable extinction, and she knew from her aching
company, three or four more which he hadn't expected. bones when the Japanese were slaughtering the dolphins.
But he saw more than the lights, for even the rain couldn't A human lodestone, she tracked illicit nuclear waste,
wash away the tortured, monotonously tumbling figure monitored pollution, shrank from
from the screen of his mind.
yawning holes in the ozone as a coral polyp from a sion. Perhaps it had to do with his talent: in a world
diver's probing spearpoint. Yes, she was an 'ecopath': she where the plain truth was increasingly hard to find, it
felt for the Earth and suffered all of its sicknesses, and was no easy thing being a lie-detector. White lies, half-
unlike the rest of us knew that she, too, was dying from truths, and downright fables came at Trask from all
them. directions, until sometimes he felt he didn't want to look
Trask looked at her: she was twenty-four and looked any more.
fifty. Despite his pity, perhaps paradoxically, he thought But Anna Marie English had her own problems.
of her in harsh, disassociated, almost disapproving terms Finally she nodded her bedraggled mop of a head. 'I see
- thick-lensed spectacles, liver spots, hearing aid, it, yes, but don't ask me what it's all about. I woke up,
straggly-haired, crumpled blouse, splay-legged - and saw it, and knew I had to come here. That's all. But I've a
knew he disliked her because she mirrored the decline of hunch the world's a loser yet again.' Her voice was a
the world. And that was his talent at work. Ben Trask was coughing rasp.
a human lie-detector: he recognized a lie when he saw, 'A hunch?'
felt, heard, or otherwise perceived one as other men This thing isn't specific to me,' she frowned. This time
recognize a slap in the face; so that conversely, in the I'm just . . . an onlooker? It isn't hurting me. I feel for
absence of falsehood he must acknowledge truth. Except him, yes, but his fate doesn't seem to have made much
Anna Marie English's truth was unbearable. If impression on the world in general. Yet at the same
Greenpeace had her and could make the world believe in time, somehow I think it makes the world less.'
her, they would win their case in one ... though of course 'Do you know him?'
it would be lost at one and the same time. For they'd 'I feel that I should know him, certainly,' she
suspect that they were too late. But Trask also knew that answered, simultaneously shaking her head. And
it wasn't quite like that. The world was a huge creature ruefully, 'I know that I was watching him when I should
and had been sorely wounded, and Anna Marie English have been watching the road. I went through two red
was just too small to sustain so much damage. But while lights at least!'
she was suffering almost beyond endurance, the Earth Trask nodded, took her by the elbow and guided her
could go on taking it for a long time yet. This was Trask's across the street. 'Let's join them and see if anyone else
view of it, anyway. He supposed it made him an optimist, has a clue.' In fact he already had more than a clue but
which was something of a paradox in itself. was unwilling to give it voice. If he was right, then just
'Can you see it?' he said. 'Do you have any idea what like the ecopath he could scarcely view this
it's all about?' phenomenon as Earth-damaging. In fact it might even
She looked at him and saw a mousey-haired, green- be a relief.
eyed man in his late thirties. Trask was about five feet With Whitehall no more than a ten minute walk away,
ten, a little overweight and slope-shouldered, and wore the torn front page from a discarded Pravda seemed
what could only be described as a lugubrious expres- strangely out of place where it spun slowly in the
current of the flooded gutter, inching soggily and
6
 Hologram or phantom? Trask wondered. Gadget ...
perhaps prophetically towards the iron-barred throat of a
or ghost? When he was a kid he'd believed in ghosts.