"Axler, James - Deathlands 021 - Twilight Children - Laurence James 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Axler James)

Nobody had ever known how many of the massive military fortresses had been constructed during the last years of international tension before nuke-day came and went. When Ryan had ridden with the Trader they'd been lucky enough to come across several.

One in the Apps had contained several mothballed war wags on which the Trader had based his whole operation. Another, one hundred and fifty miles north

of the ruins of Boston, had contained enough stored tanks of high-octane gas to keep them in jack for years.

All that was known was that the chain of redoubts had been a part of the Totality Concept and they'd been constructed under conditions of the utmost secrecy. Despite the whining of the pinko conservation-ists, the government had compulsorily taken over huge sectors of the country, including thousands of square miles of some of the most favored, most beautiful and most isolated national parks.

The irony was that the eventual war was so sudden and apocalyptic that the redoubts proved to have absolutely zero military significance and most showed signs of having been rapidly evacuated in the last few weeks of what remained of civilization and order.

By traveling from gateway to gateway, Ryan and his companions had located many more hidden redoubts, in varying stages of preservation or destruction.

But they'd certainly never come across one that looked like it was still being built.

Not until now.

"Look here, Dad!" Dean had gone ahead, through the crudely carved doorway into what would normally be the control room for the entire mat-trans operation. There would be rows of consoles and banks of comp desks, with dancing gauges and flickering dials and lights. All were powered by a hidden nuke gen, pulsing away in the deeps of the fortress.

"There's something seriously wrong here, lover." Krysty had followed the boy through, pausing and looking around her in disbelief.

"It's just a hut, Dad."

The walls and ceiling of the building were bare rock, with the same thread of emerald quartz running through it. But it was barely a quarter the size of the normal control room. There were comp consoles, but only twenty or so, mounted on makeshift tables, some with broken legs propped on red bricks.

"The air," Mildred said, sniffing. "Not like it usually is, either."

Ryan breathed in, half closing his eye. The woman was right. It didn't have that dusty flatness that recirculated air normally had. This was bitter and sharp, like a vaporized acid-rain storm.

There were loops of multicolored cable draped all over the place, with junction boxes and ends of sprayed bare metal. It was amazing that the gateway was still functioning after the best part of a century- though it crossed Ryan's mind to wonder whether this mat-trans unit might actually have been rebuilt within the past few years. If so, it was a staggering thought and opened all kinds of unsuspected possibilities.

J.B. was walking slowly around, reaching up to touch the rock overhead, examining his fingers. "It's dry. This couldn't have run if it had been damp."

"These portals to the outer world are unlike any that I've ever seen. They resemble nothing more than an ordinary door on a frontier outhouse."

Doc was exaggerating a little. But only a little.

The familiar vanadium-steel sec doors, weighing hundreds of tons and operated by a complex system of gears and counterweights, weren't there.

There was a single wide door, with an ordinary handle like you might put on a garden shed. It was made from wooden planks, some of them warped and crooked, with a length of one-by-four nailed across to hold the thing together. Once upon a time it had been white, but the paint had dried and flaked, like build-Ings in a desert ghost town.

The strip lights overhead were harsh, and at least a quarter of them had malfunctioned.

"I don't get it." Ryan shook his head. "This isn't like a mat-trans unit. It's like some handyman got a load of bits and pieces that fell off the back of a wag and he just put them all together and found he'd built a gateway. But the damned thing worked. Got us here all right."

"Mebbe we should leave right now. Could be safer." J.B. tapped on the door with the butt of the Uzi. "One-armed baby could knock this down."

"Why not open it?" Dean asked, "Least take a look outside, huh, Dad?"

"I guess..."