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

have to wait just a little longer for proper clothes.
The phone box had a slot for two-kopeck pieces, but I guessed that you didn't need money for a
call inside the hotel-almost as if the phone was telling me how to use it.
Billy bawled out a number, and I dialed.
"Hullo? Can you hear me, Billy?" I said.
"Sure thing."
And I saluted the phone. This was a real fantasy moment. I could almost believe that I was phoning
home to the States. Only, of course, there were no phones left over there. Or cities, for that
matter. But still!
"General Greg Berry reporting. We've reached Khabarovsk. We're on the route of the Trans-Siberian
Railway! Group Red will set up an air shuttle service to Magadan tomorrow. Group White will take a
train down to Vladivostok, and if there aren't any Chicoms there, either-and, so help me, I know
so deep down in me there won't be any, it's as though God has told me Himself-then Group White'll


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sail the biggest warship they can handle out of the navy yards up to the Bering Sea. And Group
Blue will get the locos rolling across the Siberian railroad. We're in business!"
We horsed around on the phone for a while like a couple of kids. But of course every word of it
was true. As Mary watched, the first grin in ages appeared on her face.
It was a damned shame about last year's war, but at least now we knew that we'd won it-and
forever.
As the culmination of the U.S. government's search for nondestructive nuclear weapons, which
wouldn't wipe out the treasures of the world, we'd just deployed the Super-Radiation Bomb-which
was as much an advance upon the neutron bomb of the Eighties as the neutron bomb was upon the
unwieldy hydrogen bomb.
The SRB produced hardly any blast or heat damage; if air-burst correctly, none at all. But its
short-term radiation yield was incredible-and without any residual radioactivity. One single SRB
detonated over Moscow would kill every living thing in the city and its environs-apart from
cockroaches and such-and
it would leave all the factories and apartment blocks, all the offices and shops, all the museums
and churches, in perfect condition.
The Soviets, of course, denounced this at once as the "Super-Capitalist Bomb," because it
respected property but not persons. And they in turn unveiled their own secretly developed super
weapon, which they called the "Socialist Bomb." We called it the "SOB."
The Devil himself must have had a hand in the design of this Socialist Bomb. Its effects were far
more cruel.
How exactly it did it, I don't know for sure, and we never had time fully to suss out the theory,
but basically it generated a sub-atomic vibration field, perhaps at the quark level, that affected
any inanimate matter that had in any way been manufactured, worked, or tailored by man, leaving a
particular "signature" written in it. The SOB had no effect at all on living tissue, or landscape,
or minerals in the ground, or even foodstuffs-though it put paid to the containers. But it burst
the continuum, for any "made" or "shaped" article within its field. It rapidly transformed the
particles in any target object into "virtual" particles so that they slipped out of existence,
perhaps reemerging somewhere else in our universe, or in some parallel universe. Within minutes a
thing grew soft, then foggy, then vanished away.
In other words, drop an SOB on New York City and very soon you would have no New York City at all,
only an empty space with millions of people wandering around stark-naked. Yes, we would be