"Blish, James - Tomb Tapper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

Tomb Tapper

THE DISTANT glare of the atomic explosion had already faded
from the sky as McDonough's car whirred away from the
blacked-out town of Port Jervis and turned north. He was
making fifty m.p.h. on U.S. Route 209 using no lights but
his parkers, and if a deer should bolt across the road ahead
of him he would never see it until the impact. 'It was hard
enough to see the road.
But he was thinking, not for the first time, of the old joke
about the man who tapped train wheels.
He had been doing it, so the story ran, for thirty years. On
every working day be would go up and down both sides of
every locomotive that pulled into the yards and hit the
wheels with a hammer; first the drivers, then the trucks. Each
time, he would cock his head, as though listening for some-
thing in the sound. On the day of his retirement, he was
given a magnificent dinner, as befitted a man with long senior-
ity in the Brotherhood of Railway Trainmenand somebody
stopped to ask him what he had been tapping for all those
years.
He had cocked his head as though listening for something,
but evidently nothing came. "I don't know," he said.
That's me, McDonough thought. I tap tombs, not trains.
But what am I listening for?
The speedometer said he was close to the turnoff for the
airport, and he pulled the dimmers on. There it was. There
was at first nothing to be seen, as the headlights swept along
the dirt road, but a wall of darkness deep as all night,
faintly edged at the east by the low domed hills of the
Neversink valley. Then another pair of lights snapped on
behind him, on the main highway, and came jolting after
McDonough's car, clear and sharp in the dust clouds he had
raised.
He swung the car to a stop beside the airport fence and
killed the lights; the other car followed. In the renewed black-
ness the faint traces of dawn on the hills were wiped out, as
though the whole universe had been set back an hour. Then
the yellow eye of a flashlight opened in the window of the
other car and stared into his face.
He opened the door. "Martinson?" he said tentatively.
"Right here," the adjutant's voice said. The flashlight's
oval spoor swung to the ground. "Anybody else with you?"
"No. You?"
"No. Go ahead and get your equipment out. Ill open up
the shack."
The oval spot of light bobbed across the parking area and
came to uneasy rest on the combination padlock which held
the door of the operations shack secure. McDonough flipped