"Kim Stanley Robinson - The Lucky Strike" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

THE LUCKY STRIKE
Kim Stanley Robinson

Stories of alternative worlds tend to be very colorful, sometimes even bizarre, as sf writers imagine how
different our world might have been if the Romans had colonized North America or if the dinosaurs hadn't
become extinct. The alternative world in this thoughtful novelette presents a much more contemporary
change in history… a change we see in the making. The result is just as important, though.

Kim Stanley Robinson's first novel, The Wild Shore, was nominated for the Nebula Award earlier this
year. His second novel is Icehenge.

War breeds strange pastimes. In July of 1945 on Tinian Island in the North Pacific,
Captain Frank January had taken to piling pebble cairns on the crown of Mount Lasso-
one pebble for each B-29 takeoff, one cairn for each mission. The largest cairn had
four hundred stones in it. It was a mindless pastime, but so was poker. The men of the
509th had played a million hands of poker, sitting in the shade of a palm around an
upturned crate sweating in their skivvies, swearing and betting all their pay and
cigarettes, playing hand after hand after hand, until the cards got so soft and dog-eared
you could have used them for toilet paper. Captain January had gotten sick of it, and
after he lit out for the hilltop a few times some of his crewmates started trailing him.
When their pilot Jim Fitch joined them it became an official pastime, like throwing
flares into the compound or going hunting for stray Japs. What Captain January
thought of the development he didn't say. The others grouped near Captain Fitch, who
passed around his battered flask. "Hey January," Fitch called. "Come have a shot."

January wandered over and took the flask. Fitch laughed at his pebble. "Practising
your bombing up here, eh Professor?"

"Yah," January said sullenly. Anyone who read more than the funnies was
Professor to Fitch. Thirstily January knocked back some rum. He could drink it any
way he pleased up here, out from under the eye of the group psychiatrist. He passed
the flask on to Lieutenant Matthews, their navigator.

"That's why he's the best," Matthews joked. "Always practising."

Fitch laughed. "He's best because I make him be best, right Professor?"

January' frowned. Fitch was a bulky youth, thick-featured, pig-eyed-a thug, in
January's opinion. The rest of the crew were all in their mid-twenties like Fitch, and
they liked the captain's bossy roughhouse style. January, who was thirty-seven, didn't
go for it. He wandered away, back to the cairn he had been building. From Mount
Lasso they had an overview of the whole island, from the harbor at Wall Street to the
north field in Harlem. January had observed hundreds of B-29s roar off the four
parallel runways of the north field and head for Japan. The last quartet of this
particular mission buzzed across the width of the island, and January dropped four
more pebbles, aiming for crevices in the pile. One of them stuck nicely.

"There they are!" said Matthews. "They're on the taxiing strip."

January located the 5O9th's first plane. Today, the first of August, there was