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

guess what? You get to catch the flak when it gets postponed." I grinned at him, and he
managed a tired smile and shrug. Maybe he'd hate my guts, and maybe he'd get things
done just to spite me. I didn't mind. He hopped out, and we closed the sliding door on the
helicopter. Almost immediately the pilot started up. I looked around. It was a good old
Huey, owned and operated by the U.S. Army. Hueys are great, but they tend to be drafty.
The pilot wore a sergeant's stripes.
"How far apart are the two planes?" I asked him.
"About twenty miles, sir."
"Do you know which one Roger Keane is at? He's the guy from -- "
"I know him, sir. I just took him to the one on Mount Diablo. He said I should bring you
there."
"That's fine. What's it like? On the ground."
"Muddy. It stopped raining about a half hour ago. The trucks are having a lot of trouble
getting to it. There's nothing up there but fire trails."


When I found out the DC-10 was not too far out of the route to the 747 crash site, I told
the sergeant to detour and fly over it. It wasn't hard to find.
 The DC-10 had made an impact about half a mile north of Interstate 580, not far from
Livermore. In what looked m be open fields, hundreds of red and blue lights flashed. Some
flame was visible, but the fuel had by then burnt itself out and the damp ground wasn't
going to present any problems. All the pinpoints of light were more or less centered on a
dark, circular area.
Obviously, I had known what to expect, but some part of me is still surprised, still asks
the stupid question. I was out here to see a plane crash, but where was the plane? The pilot
brought us down lower, nervously eyeing the myriad lights of other aircraft hovering,
landing, or taking off from the vicinity. Still, there was no plane. There were spotlights down
there. All they showed was churned up ground and a meaningless confetti of small,
shapeless objects, nothing that looked bigger than a hubcap or a car door.
I got a bad feeling looking down at it. Part of it was because it was an unusual site;
generally the imprint is a long, messy streak. There will be some recognizable objects
strewn along the way, some of them quite large, like engine cowlings, big hunks of wing,
part- of a fuselage. The mark Flight 35 had left on the ground looked very much like what a
bullet would make hitting thick glass: a crater and rays of disturbance.
Flight 35 had literally splashed into the ground.




2 "All You Zombies -- "


Testimony of Louise Baltimore
Tell everything, he said.
Fine, but where do I start? The order of events is, at best, a convenient fiction. Seen from
another vantage point, things happened very differently. I can hear the universe laughing at
me as I try to envision a beginning. However, even us highly evolved mutant-type critters
from the seventeenth dimension are, when you get down to it, time-binding apes who live in
the eternal Now. No matter how many knots I tie in my lifeline I still move down it the old-
fashioned way, in only one direction, taking it one subjective second at a time.