"Lavie Tidhar - Revolution Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tidhar Lavie)

Revolution Time

by Lavie Tidhar



Story Copyright (C) 2007, Lavie Tidhar.
Images Copyright (C) 2007, Rudy Rucker.
4,000 Words.




It was night when we set out to capture the time machine.

It ends in daylight though, and begins... it begins sometime in the middle of the day, when the sun beats
down on your skin and you suddenly realise how close the desert is to Hope.

I was standing outside the Chrono Building trying to look like a tourist.

Which wasn’t that difficult, really. The Chrono Building is the seventh most visited buildings in the United
States – it says so in large block letters outside – and the main reason tourists come to Hope, Nevada -
my home town - at all. They stood all around me on the broad pavilion across the road from the institute,
wearing a uniform expression of detached interest, aiming cameras at the building. I took several pictures,
more to blend in than for any real use. I knew that the building, the iron-wrought gate, the ivy and the two
security guards outside were an expensive-looking façade, no more real than most of the government’s
lies.

All aspects of a job must be studied carefully before undertaken, however. I’m quoting my recruiter to
the Movement, Mr. Gideon Nehru, here. It used to be one of his favourite maxims. So I did my part,
photographed the building, the outlying streets, possible entrances, how often the guards changed... grunt
work, and redundant besides, since everyone knows the real body of the institute is several miles away,
where the town ends and the desert begins. Like Area 51 in its time, it’s a badly-kept secret.

I’d already spent over a week side-tracked to this part of the operation. It wasn’t only the building, of
course. I made note of the researchers and politicians who came through the building, making detailed
photographic records of each one. I knocked on doors in various pretences to try and determine
possible observation posts, escape routes, pick up rumours and gossip which may prove useful.

Satisfied at last that I could finish my watch, I made my way with the other tourists to the Underground
station, and took the train to the cell’s meeting place.

There were four members in my cell. Joe, a tall, thin Thai who, as a student at the local university, was on
temporary reassignment from the unions in Bangkok. Monty, from the Outer Kibbutz Movement, short
and dark haired and intense.

Myself.

And Morgan... skin as white as only an English girl’s can be, hair and eyes that were pure darkness. She
was Grand Mistress of a splinter Wicca group with a socialist/anarchist bend from across the Atlantic.