"Mack Reynolds - After Utopia" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

No, that was ridiculous.
But now, in an impossible sort of way, part of his brain
seemed to stand off and watch the rest of him. As
though—what was the term the occult crackpots
used?—as though his astral body was standing aloof from
him and watching his every action.



Chapter Two
«^»
Tracy Cogswell stood up suddenly. The pinwheel was
gone now. But there was still something there. And still
his second self stood off and seemingly watched,
completely puzzled. And there was even a touch of fear.
Was he simply drunk?
Purposefully, Cogswell strode over to the heaviest of
the steel files, fished his keys from his pocket and
unlocked it. Inside the bottom drawer was a heavy
strongbox. Another key opened it. He fished out more
than a thousand dollars in pounds, French francs,
fifty-dollar bills and British gold sovereigns. His
emergency money. He also brought forth two bankbooks,
one on Barclay’s in Gibraltar and one on the Moses
Pariente bank here in Tangier, as well as his emergency
forged Australian passport.
He tucked all of these into his pockets and went into
the bedroom where he fished a suitcase from under the
bed.
While his separate ‘sane’ self watched in growing
amazement and disconcertedness, Tracy Cogswell rapidly
packed his bag. He ignored the light Luger in the top
drawer of his bureau and, contrary to his usual custom,
packed no reading material at all.
Fifteen minutes after first seeing the pin wheel, he was
carefully locking the door of his apartment behind him.
Down on the street, he strolled over to Rue Goya,
tossing his apartment keys into a corner refuse can on
the way. In front of the Goya Theatre, he hailed a Chico
Cab and said, “ Je voudrais aller au Grand Zocco .”
This could only be a dream. A dream composed of too
much work, too little relaxation, too much strain, and
two of Paul Lund’s heavy charges of Pernod.
But all the time he knew it was no dream.
In the Grand Zocco, the open-air market of the medina
section of town, he paid the cab driver and started
purposefully down the Rue Siaghines, which led to the
Petit Zocco, once the most notorious square in the world.
Past him streamed the multiracial populace of what
was possibly the most cosmopolitan city on earth.