"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

insisted. Give me that call and we can work it out.
Then the noise of a distant siren hauled him up, sweaty and unhappy. He lay there a
while longer, thinking about the woman's face. Once in high school he had made out
with a girl in a little car like this one, in which the laid-back seat had allowed them
somehow to lie on each other. He wanted her. He wanted to find her. From the boat she
had said she would call. I don't know how long, she had said. Maybe that meant long.
He would just have to wait. Unless he could figure out some new way to hunt for her.
The sky was lightening. Now he definitely wouldn't be able to fall back asleep. With a
groan he heaved himself up, got out of the car.
He stood on the sidewalk, feeling wasted. The sky was a velvet gray, seeming darker
than it had in the middle of the night. The air was cool. He walked east again, back into
the park.
Dew polished the thick gray foliage. In the diffuse low light the wet leaves looked
like a forest of wax. Frank slowed down. He saw what looked like a trail, perhaps an
animal trail. There were lots of deer in the park, the article had said. He could hear the
sound of Rock Creek, a burbling that as he descended overwhelmed the city sounds, the
perpetual grumble of trucking. The sky was lightening fast, and what had seemed to
him cloud cover was revealed as a clear pale sky. Dim greens began to flush the grays.
The air was still cool.
It turned out that in this area Rock Creek ran at the bottom of a fairly steep ravine, and
the flood had torn the sidewalls away in places, as he saw when he came to a sudden
drop-off. Below him, bare sandstone extruded roots like ripped wiring. He circled above
the drop, dodging between low trees.
From a little clearing he could suddenly see downstream. The flood in spate had torn
the Little canyon clear. Everything that had been down there before— Beach Road, the
small bridges and buildings, the ranger station, the picnic areas—all of it was gone,
leaving a raw zone of bare sandstone, flat mud, thrashed grass, downed timber, and
stubborn trees that were either clinging to life or dead in place. Many trees had been
knocked over and yet held on by a few roots, forming living snags piled high with mud
and trash. A larger snag downstream looked like a giant beaver dam, creating a
dirt-brown pond.
The sky stood big and blue overhead, a tall dome that seemed to rise as the day
lightened. Muddy Rock Creek burbled noisily down its course, spilling from one foamy
brown stretch to the next.
 At the far edge of the pond a heron stepped, its knees bending backward. Long body,
long legs, long neck, long head, long beak. A great blue heron, Frank guessed, though
this one's dark gray feathers looked more green than blue. A kind of dinosaur. And
indeed nothing could have looked more pterodactylic. Two hundred million years.
Sunlight blazed green at the tops of the trees across the ravine. Frank and the heron
stood attentively, listening to unseen smaller birds whose wild twittering now filled the
air. The heron's head cocked to one side. For a time everything was as still as bronze.
Then beyond the twittering came a different sound, fluid and clear, rising like a siren,
like a hook in the flesh:
Oooooooooooooooooop!
National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia, basement parking lot, seven a.m. A
primate sitting in his car, thinking things over. As one of the editors of The Journal of
Sociobiology, Frank was very much aware of the origins of their species. The third chimp,
as Diamond had put it. Now he thought: chimps sleep outdoors. Bonobos sleep
outdoors.
Housing was ultimately an ergonomic problem. What did he really need? His