"R. Garcia y Robertson - The Good Ship Lollypop" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robertson R Garcia Y)

For once Mom was right. Shirlee never went visiting again without
calling first. Jill would let Lomax out, and the huge furry, Dire wolf-dog cross
would meet Shirlee in the Hall of Tables. Adults all claimed the Boogie man
did not exist. But Shirlee was not fooled, nor was Lomax.

Shirlee did not see the Boogie man again until she was a teenager,
but he was still out there.

Two years later, Jill’s cousin Didi disappeared while picking
strawberries. Net searches turned up nothing but the broken ID band that
had been around her ankle. Alongside two spilled baskets of strawberries.

By then, Shirlee and Jill were big enough for field work. Shirlee
enjoyed spending days above ground, in the habitat’s broad agricultural
strip, bathed in bright mirror-enhanced sunlight, eating cherries and berries
whenever she liked.

But when the mirrors tilted toward night, throwing shadows over the
fields, she remembered Didi, glancing nervously over her shoulder.

“Scared of the dark?” asked Jill.

Shirlee shuddered. “You did not see him.”

“You did not lose a cousin,” Jill reminded her.

When it got too dark to work, Jill whistled up Lomax, and the wolf-dog
saw them home.
 Shirlee celebrated turning thirteen by inviting Jill, Carol, and Tina to a
private party in an empty dorm room. Slipping off their ID anklets, and
blanking the security cams, they split up one of Mom’s Z-pills.

Saying a prayer to Elviz, who had been an official narcotics agent,
they solemnly swallowed their little bits of Z.

Never having taken any Z, not even a quarter pill, Shirlee was
astonished. Walls moved back, as the little room expanded and dissolved,
letting in the cosmos. She felt the living strawberry fields above, and the
sunlight shining off the habitat’s silver mirrors.

Finding the bare abandoned room far too confining, the girls blanked
the corridor cams, then went giggling up to the surface, to run free through
the fields, whooping and waving their hands.

Shirlee whirled around among the young plants, lit by the silver shining
mirrors. She felt free and in the open, like when she was little. Not watched,
not IDed. Unconfined and unafraid. Light streamed down from Niger A, the
system’s yellow sun, warming her skin. All that separated her from the
cosmos was a transparent radiation barrier, holding in a thin layer of air.