"Ian Watson - Returning Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watson Ian)

file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Ian%20Watson%20-%20Returning%20Home.txt

Version 0.5 dtd 040800



RETURNING HOME
By Ian Watson
Thank God, the runway was clear. An Aeroflot crew had apparently touched down just moments before
a radiation bomb went off overhead. But the pilot's nervous system lasted long enough for him to
steer his plane off the concrete onto grass-unless he had merely swerved.
Anyway, our landing was a pushover. As well it needed to be, with upwards of thirty million
displaced Americans pushing behind us. There were two hundred of us packed into our plane-with a
second Ilyushin to follow some hours later.
Most wonderful of all, there was no reception committee of Chinese waiting for us. So those
Canadian bastards hadn't been lying after all. The Chinese hadn't flooded over the frontier to
fill up this spur of the Soviet Union. And yet somehow we hadn't believed that the Chinese would.
It was as if the spirit that impelled us toward the East had promised us this
land and had preserved it for us.
Leaving Group Red at the airport, the rest of us rounded up some brand-new buses, got them going,
and drove in convoy into downtown Khabarovskending up outside the Far East Hotel on Karl Marx
Street, which seemed as good a place as any other to billet ourselves for the time being.
There weren't too many shriveled mummies in the streets. The streets themselves were reasonably
clean and neat. The human animal seemed to prefer to die in its burrow, if it could get there in
time.
I'd just told Hank Sullivan to take a fatigue squad round the hotel to clear all the bodies they
found into a single room and was getting the others organized, when Mary cried out, "Greg, come
over here."
She was waving the handset of an old-fashioned looking telephone, farther down the lobby.
I hadn't been meaning to bring Mary in on the first flight. Strictly the two hundred of us were a
technical spearhead, and Mary wasn't a sailor or mechanic or locomotive driver. But she was a fine
survivor, and if dishing up fish and chipmunk stew or nettle-and mushroom soup without a single
pot or stove isn't a technical accomplishment, then I don't know what is.
So when she'd insisted, we'd compromised by leaving little Suzie in good hands up in Magadan for
later delivery, and Mary came along as our provisions officer. She was still looking fairly gaunt-
as were we all-and her blond hair had all grown out a mousy brown. But I loved her even more
dearly after all that we'd been through.
"What is it?"
"The phone works, Greg."
I ran to her, while everyone turned to watch us, and it was then-when I got my hands on that phone
and heard it humming-that it really all came home to me: We had won through.
Because the goddamn lovely old phone was receiving power. No doubt from some hydroelectric scheme
that was still churning out electricity automatically.
"Hey, Billy Donaldson," I called across the lobby, "get your ass behind that check-in desk and
find another phone along there. Call out your number."
Hitching up his Soviet Army greatcoat, redheaded Billy stepped over the assorted wizened corpses
in their crumpled, dusty suits and dresses, careful not to soil the garments with his boots.
As the first pioneer group to cross the Bering Strait, we'd all got rid of our bark-and-straw
boots and our stinking dog- and cowhide coats as soon as we reached the first Soviet outpost. The
other scraggy survivors still converging on the tip of Alaska, this summer after the War, would