"Charles Stross - Missile Gap" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stross Charles)

It’s early spring, a weekday morning, and the toilet attendant seems to be taking the emergency as a
personal comment on the cleanliness of his porcelain. He jumps up and down agitatedly as he shoves Gregor
down the spiral staircase into the shelter, like a short troll in a blue uniform stocking his larder. “Three
minutes!” shouts the troll. “Hold fast in three minutes!” So many people in London are wearing uniforms these
days, Gregor reflects; it’s almost as if they believe that if they play their wartime role properly the ineffable will
constrain itself to their expectations of a humanly comprehensible enemy.
A double-bang splits the air above the park and echoes down the stairwell. It’ll be RAF or USAF interceptors
outbound from the big fighter base near Hanworth. Gregor glances round: A couple of oafish gardeners sit on
the wooden benches inside the concrete tunnel of the shelter, and a louche City type in a suit leans against
the wall, irritably fiddling with an unlit cigarette and glaring at the NO SMOKING signs. “Bloody nuisance,
eh?” he snarls in Gregor’s direction.
Gregor composes his face in a thin smile. “I couldn’t possibly comment,” he says, his Hungarian accent
betraying his status as a refugee. (Another sonic boom rattles the urinals, signaling the passage of yet more
fighters.) The louche businessman will be his contact, Goldsmith. He glances at the shelter’s counter. Its dial
is twirling slowly, signaling the marked absence of radon and fallout. Time to make small-talk, verbal primate
grooming: “Does it happen often?”
The corporate tough relaxes. He chuckles to himself. He’ll have pegged Gregor as a visitor from stranger
shores, the new NATO dominions overseas where they settled the latest wave of refugees ejected by the
communists. Taking in the copy of The Telegraph and the pattern of stripes on Gregor’s tie he’ll have realized
what else Gregor is to him. “You should know, you took your time getting down here. Do you come here often
to visit the front line, eh?”
“I am here in this bunker with you,” Gregor shrugs. “There is no front line on a circular surface.” He sits down
on the bench opposite the businessman gingerly. “Cigarette?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” The businessman borrows Gregor’s cigarette case with a flourish: the symbolic
peace-offering accepted, they sit in silence for a couple of minutes, waiting to find out if it’s the curtain call for
world war four, or just a trailer.
A different note drifts down the staircase, the warbling tone that indicates the all-clear these days. The Soviet
bombers have turned for home, the ragged lion’s stumpy tail tickled yet again. The toilet troll dashes down
the staircase and windmills his arms at them: “No smoking in the nuclear bunker!” he screams. “Get out! Out,
I say!”
Gregor walks back into Regent’s Park, to finish disposing of his stale bread-crumbs and ferry the contents of
his cigarette case back to the office. The businessman doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to be arrested, and
his English nationalist/neutralist cabal interned: meanwhile, Gregor is being recalled to Washington DC. This
is his last visit, at least on this particular assignment. There are thin times ahead for the wood pigeons.




Chapter Two: Voyage
It’s a moonless night and the huge reddened whirlpool of the Milky Way lies below the horizon. With only the
reddish-white pinprick glare of Lucifer for illumination, it’s too dark to read a newspaper.
Maddy is old enough to remember a time when night was something else: when darkness stalked the
heavens, the Milky Way a faded tatter spun across half the sky. A time when ominous Soviet spheres
bleeped and hummed their way across a horizon that curved, when geometry was dominated by pi,
astronomy made sense, and serious men with horn-rimmed glasses and German accents were going to the
moon. October 2, 1962: that’s when it all changed. That’s when life stopped making sense. (Of course it first
stopped making sense a few days earlier, with the U-2 flights over the concrete emplacements in Cuba, but
there was a difference between the lunacy of brinksmanship–Khrushchev’s shoe banging on the table at the
UN as he shouted “we will bury you!”–and the flat earth daydream that followed, shattering history and
plunging them all into this nightmare of revisionist geography.)