"Blish, James - Bindlestiff - txt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

УMines, I suspect,Ф Amalfi said.
УThatТs dandy,Ф Hazleton said bitterly. УTheyТll leave an escape lane for themselves, of course, but weТll never be able to find it. TheyТve got us under a plutonium umbrella, Amalfi.Ф
УWeТll get out. Go plant your women, Mark. AndЧput some clothes on Сem first. TheyТll make more of a show that way.Ф
УYou bet they will,Ф the city manager said feelingly. He went out.

A MALFI went out on the balcony. At moments of crisis, his old predilection for seeing and hearing and breathing the conflict, with his senses unfiltered and unheightened by any instruments, became too strong to resist. There was good reason for the drive, for that matter; for excitement of the everyday senses had long ago been shown to bring his orientation-sense to its best pitch.
From the balcony of City Hall, most of the northwest quadrant of the perimeter was visible. There was plenty of battle noises rattling the garish tropical sunset there, and even an occasional tiny toppling figure. The city had adopted the local dodge of clearing and gelling the mud at its rim, and had returned the gel to the morass state at the first sign of attack; but the jungle men had broad skis, of some metal no Hevian could have fashioned so precisely. Disks of red fire marked bursting TDX shells, scything the air like deathТs own winflows. No gas was in evidence, but Amalfi knew that there would be gas before long.
The cityТs retaliatory fire was largely invisible, since it emerged below the top of the perimeter. There was a Bethщ fender out, which would keep the wall from being scaledЧ until one of the projectors was knocked out; and plenty of heavy rifles were being kept hot. But the city had never been designed for warfare, and many of its most efficient destroyers had their noses buried in the earth, since their intended func
tion was only to clear a landing area. Using an out-and-out Bethщ blaster was, of course, impossible where there was an adjacent planetary mass.
He sniffed the scarlet edges of the struggle appraisingly. Under his fingers on the balcony railing were three buttons, which he had had placed there four hundred years ago. They had set in motion different things at different times. But each time, they had represented choices of action which he would have to make when the pinch came; he had never had reason to have a fourth button installed.
Rockets screamed overhead. Bombs followed, crepitating bursts of noise and smoke and flying metal. He did not look up; the very mild spindizzy screen would fend off anything moving that rapidly. Only slow-moving objects, like men, could sidle through a polarized gravitic field. He looked out to the horizon, touching the buttons very delicately.
Suddenly the sunset snuffed itself out. Amalfi, who had never seen a tropical sunset before coming to He, felt a vague alarm, but as far as he could see the abrupt darkness was natural, if startling. The fighting went on, the flying disks of TDX much more lurid now against the blackness.
After a while there was a dog-fight far aloft, identifiable mostly by traceries of jet trails and missiles. The jungle jammered derision and fury without any letup.
Amalfi stood, his senses reaching out slowly, feeling the positions of things. It was hard work, for he had never tried to grasp a situation at such close quarters before, and the trajectory of every shell tried to capture his attention.
About an hour past midnight, at the height of the heaviest raid yet, he felt a touch at his elbow.
УBossЧФ
Amalfi heard the word as if it had been uttered at the bottom of the Rift. The still-ascending fountain of space mines had just been touched, and he was trying to reach the top of it; somewhere up there the trumpet flattened into a shell encompassing the whole of He, and it was important to know how high up that network of orbits began.
But the utter exhaustion of the voice touched something deeper. He said, УYes, Mark.Ф
УItТs done. We lost almost everybody. But we caused a very
nice riot.Ф A ghost of animation stirred in the voice for a moment. УYou should have been there.Ф
УIТmЧalmost there now. Good . . . wo~rk, Mark. Get . some rest.Ф
УSure. ButЧФ
Something very heavy described a searing hyperbola in AmalfiТs mind, and then the whole city was a scramble of magnesium-white and ink. As the light faded, there was a formless spreading and crawling, utterly beyond any detection but AmalfiТs.
УGas alarm, Mark,Ф he heard himself saying. УHawkesite barium suits for everybody.Ф
УYes. Right. Boss, youТll kill yourself running things this way.Ф
Amalfi found that he could not answer. He had found the town where the women had been dropped. Nothing clear came through, but there was certainly a riot there, and it was not entirely within the town itself. Tendrils of movement were being turned back from the Okie city, and were weaving out from places where there had been no sign of activity before.
At the base of the mine fountain, something else new was happening. A mass rose slowly, and there was a thick flowing around it. Then it stopped, and there was a sense of doors opening, heavy potentials moving out into tangled desolation. The tramps were leaving their city. The unmistakable, slightly nauseating sensation of a spindizzy field under medium drive domed the boiling of the lake of mud.
Dawn coming now. The riot in the town where the women were still would not come clear, but it was getting worse rather than better. Abruptly there was no town there at all, but a boiling, mushrooming pillar of radioactive gasЧthe place had been bombed. The struggle moved back toward the area of tension that marked the location of the bindlestiff.
AmalfiТs own city was shrouded in sick orange mist, lit with flashes of no-color. The gas could not pass the spindizzy screen in a body, but it diffused through, molecule by heavy molecule. He realized suddenly that he had not heeded his own gas warning, and that there was probably some harm coming to him; but he could not localize it. He moved slightly, and instantly felt himself incased. WhatЧ
Barium paste. Hazleton had known that Amalfi could not leave the balcony, and evidently had plastered him with the stuff in default of trying to get a suit on him. Even his eyes were covered, and a feeling of distension in his nostrils bespoke a Kolman respirator.
The emotional and gravitic tensions in the bindlestiff city continued to gather; it would soon be unbearable. Above, just outside the space mines, the first few police vessels were sidling in cautiously. The war in the jungle had already fallen into meaninglessness. The abduction of the women from the Hevian town by the tramps had collapsed all Hevian rivalry; bandits and civilized towns alike were bent now upon nothing but the destruction of Fabr-Suithe and its allies. Fabr-Suithe could hold them off for a long time, but it was clearly time for the bindlestiff to leaveЧtime for it to make off with its women and its anti-agapics and its germanium, time for it to lose itself in the Rift before the Earth police could invest all of He.
The tension knotted suddenly, painfully, and rose away from the boiling mud. The Сstiff was taking off. Amalfi pressed the buttonЧthe only one, this time, that had been connected to anything.
Moving Day began.

V.

IT began with six pillars of glaring white, forty miles in diameter, that burst through the soft soil at every compass
point of He. Fabr-Suithe had sat directly over the site of one of them. The bandit town was nothing but a flake of ash in a split second, a curled flake borne aloft on the top of a white-hot piston.
The pillars lunged roaring into the heavens, fifty, a hundred, two hundred miles, and burst at their tops like popcorn. The sky burned thermite-blue with steel meteors. Outside, the space mines, cut off from the world of which they had been satellites by the greatest spin-dizzy screen of all time, fled into the Rift.
And when the meteors had burned away, the sun was growing.
The world of He was on over-drive, its magnetic moment transformed, expressed as momentum; it was the biggest city
ever flown. There was no time to feel alarmed. The sun flashed by and was dwindling to a point before the fact could be grasped. It was gone. The far wall of the Rift began to swell, and separate into individual points of light.
Appalled, Amalfi fought to grasp the scale of speed. He failed. The planet of He was moving, that was all he could comprehend; its speed gulped light-years like gnats. Even to think of controlling so stupendous a flight was ridiculous.
Stars began to wink past He like fireflies. Then they were all behind.
The surface of the saucer that was the galaxy receded.
УBoss, weТre going out of theЧФ
УI know it. Get me a fix on the Hevian sun before itТs too late.Ф
Hazleton worked feverishly. It took him only three minutes, but during those three minutes, the massed stars receded far enough so that the gray scar of the Rift became plain, as a definite mark on a spangled ground. The Hevian sun was less than an atom in it.
УGot it. But we canТt swing the planet back. ItТll take us two thousand years to cross to the next galaxy. WeТll have to abandon He, boss, or weТre sunk.Ф
УAll right. Get us aloft. Full drive.Ф