"John Varley - Millennium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

Prologue


Testimony of Louise Baltimore
The DC-10 never had a chance. It was a fine aircraft, even though at that point in time it
was still under a cloud of controversy resulting from incidents in Paris and Chicago. But
when you lose that much wing you're no longer in a flying machine, you're in an aluminum
rock.
That's how the Ten came in: straight down and spiraling.
But the 747, as I was telling Wilbur Wright just the other day, ranks up there with the
DC-3 Gooney Bird and the Fokker-Aerospatiale HST as one of the most reliable hunks of
airframe ever designed.. It's true that this one came out of the collision in better shape than
the DC-10, and there is no doubt it was mortally wounded. But the grand old whale
managed to pull up into straight and level flight and maintain it. Who knows what might
have been possible if that mountain hadn't got in the way? And it retained a surprising
amount of structural integrity as it belly-flopped and rolled over -- a maneuver no one at
Boeing had envisioned in their design parameters. The proof of this could be seen in the
state of the passengers: there were upwards of thirty bodies without a single limb detached.
If it hadn't caught fire, there might even have been some faces intact.
I've always thought it would be a spectacular show to witness in your final seconds.
Would you really rather die in bed? Well, maybe so. One way of dying is probably much
like any other.




1 "A Sound of Thunder"


Testimony of Bill Smith
My phone rang just before one o'clock on the morning of December 10.
I could leave it there, just say my phone rang, but it wouldn't convey the actual
magnitude of the event.
I once spent seven hundred dollars for an alarm clock. It wasn't an alarm clock when I
bought it and it was a lot more than that when I got through with it. The heart of the thing
was a World War Two surplus air-raid siren. I added items here and there and, when I was
through, it would have given the San Francisco earthquake stiff competition as a means of
getting somebody out of bed.
Later, I connected my second telephone to this doomsday machine.
I got the second phone when I found myself jumping every time the first one rang. Only
six people at the office knew the number of the new phone, and it solved two problems very
neatly. I stopped twitching at the sound of telephone bells, and I never again was awakened
by somebody who came to the house to tell me that the alarm had come in, I had been
called and failed to answer, and I had been replaced on the go-team.
I'm one of those people who sleep like the dead. Always have; my mother used to tumble
me out of bed to get me to school. Even in the Navy, while all around me were losing sleep
thinking about the flight deck in the morning, I could stack Z's all night and have to be
rousted out by the C.O.