"Broderick, Damien - The Dreaming (The Dreaming Dragons)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Broderick Damien)

More silly giggles, in the swaying, terrible nowhere, and a shockingly blatant sound of slurping.
The universe returned, in a deluge to crack the head. Bill delFord screamed, piteously, and clamped palms over ears, elbows striking together. He was elevated; the light of souls beyond souls, crystalline glory, intolerable hubbub of infinite conversation; white radiance enclosed him, lifting him in a moment from his body which hung below in the silvery bubble (but that was gone already), showed him with his mouth slack and inane tears of mirth under his eyelids, his arms moving out to batter the woman beside him who turned, her thighs spreading in invitation and the other man shifting in weightlessness to bring down his head; all of this in an instant, imploding; and he fell back into his body, aghast, bereft, clinging to the spheres of endless light...
The astronaut lifted his face in stupefaction and humiliation, banging his head against the wire frame. Anne moaned, and her face filled with a deeper flush. Groaning, Bill reached up and took the phone in his hand. He hurled it with great force across the floor of the dome. His stomach ached abominably.
'If you're still hungry,' he said, 'let's go eat lunch.'
Lapp ignored the jibe. Glancing from the shattered phone to delFord and back to Anne, his face tightened with delayed understanding. 'I'm sorry.'
'Don't be silly,' Anne told him. Lightly, with affection, she jabbed his arm, swinging down out of the cradle. 'Par for the course. Here at Huxley, we're famous for letting it all hang out.'
Obliquely, Bill added: 'Ancient history.'
'What he means is, we had a little fling and that was that. Nice while it lasted, though.' She gave Bill a friendly hug. 'Hugh, how did the subjective effects compare to your previous test?'
Instantly Lapp was all business. 'The out-of-body phenomena, virtually identical. All that cretinous punning? Totally new. Frankly, I'm astonished. My jokes might be pretty bad, but kindergarten humour hasn't broken me up like that since I was four years old. What in hell happened?'
They paid no attention to Harrington, who hopped anxiously from foot to foot, trying without success to insert his suddenly irrelevant technical questions. General Sutton remained aloof on the far side of the test area, isolated by his manifest disapproval of the proceedings. Bill shivered, and slipped his feet into his battered Indian sandals. The dome was solar-warmed, but even in California the chill of winter leaked into a large enough convecting space. 'Not kindergarten, Hugh,' he said thoughtfully. 'Small children don't know the names of too many philosophers of science. Good grief. Sir Karl Pooper indeed!'
'I agree,' Anne said. 'That wasn't clinical regression. I think it was something more frightening than that -- as though our brains were switched off. No, that's not right. As if conscious awareness was closed down, I felt as if my mind were functioning at the level of a, an indexing program. Pulling pieces of data out of memory and juxtaposing them on the instruction of some puerile subroutine triggered by your goddamn crude farting phone.'
'A network node,' Lapp mused. 'Operating mechanically, without any true intelligence. Certainly without a trace of mature judgment.' He scratched at his head, a curiously childlike gesture. 'But why should external shielding screw up the brain's interior software? Or hardware. Whichever.'
'By golly, I think maybe my hunch was correct all along,' Bill said with wonderment. 'We've proved Carl Jung right. The gluon field literally cut us off from the collective unconscious. It left us isolated. Absolutely severed from the rest of humanity. Just the three of us to anchor one another, linked in a hermetically sealed bubble...'
The technicians, he noticed, were jockeying for advantage, staring with blatant enthusiasm at Anne's naked body. He glanced down at his own uninspiring belly.
'I think we'd better get our pants on,' he said in a low voice. 'Dwayne would really be pissed if the Vice Squad put the arm on us at this point.'
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*5. California*
At three in the morning, the hour the beasts in tight leather boots prefer when they come to take you away, Bill delFord roused blurrily to the sharp knock on his door. Selma's regular breathing had not altered. He lay on his back, the formless dread of nightmare slowly ebbing. In dream, he reminded himself hazily, the voluntary muscles relax entirely. Occasionally the sense of paralysis leaks through, permeating dream with the terrors of captivity, threat, claustrophobia. Yet that inchoate sensation can also trigger tranquil illusions of levitation, he thought, of floating, of leaving the mundane body ... His heart jumped, hammering, as the brisk knocking was repeated.
Jesus, he thought. Selma stirred, grumbling, as he reached for the small digital clock beside the bed. 3:07. I'll kill the bastards, he thought in rage. His wife's bare leg was hot against his; the disparity in their nocturnal temperatures was a cause of wonder to him, and of annoyance when he woke in the night -- it made the re-entry to sleep doubly difficult. He was half out of bed when the door opened quietly and his son Ben looked in.
'For you, Dad,' the boy said laconically. 'He insisted.'
'Thanks, son,' Bill muttered. He pulled his old threadbare Chinese gown about his shoulders and padded from the room, closing the door behind him. The boy stood uneasily in the hall. 'Go back to bed, Ben. I'll tell you all about it in the morning.'
The uniform was not one Bill recognised. He poked at the grit in the corners of his eyes and glared angrily. 'Do you have any idea what hour -- '
'My apologies, Dr delFord,' the man said in a low clear voice. 'General Sutton sends his compliments. Could you dress as quickly as possible? We have a chopper standing by in Monterey to take you to the Air Force base in San Jose, where you'll meet a UN courier jet.'
DelFord's temper lost its last strand. 'You can tell Sutton to take a flying fuck at the -- ' A heavy boot blocked the closing door.
'I'm sorry, sir, but my instructions are clear. We don't have time for arguments.'
There was a sound of footsteps and another figure came out of the darkness. 'At ease, soldier. There's no need to harass the doctor.' The man stepped into the dim illumination provided by the night-light. Bill recognised him: Bryant Gellner, an ex-colleague from UCLA. He wore the dark suit and deft protocol of a UN diplomat. 'I'm sorry to wake you, Bill.' He extended his hand. 'You're looking well for a man pulled out of bed at this godless hour. I was caught on the cell phone or I'd have done the honours myself. Very well, driver, you can wait for us in the car. We shouldn't be long.'
'Bryant, you presume on our acquaintance,' Bill said without grace. 'I'd gladly invite you in for a drink if the sun wasn't over the yard arm somewhere in the Indian Ocean. What the hell's Sutton playing at this time?'
'The general's in New York at this moment and he's not getting any sleep either. In fact,' Gellner smiled, 'I imagine you're four or five hours ahead of him in that respect. If we can bid the doorstep farewell I'll explain everything in the comfort and privacy of your own home.'
'Aw shit.' A distant shimmering danced at the limits of Bill's sensations, an invisible flickering, an inaudible buzz. It increased as he passed the silent telephone. In an illogical flash of insight he conjectured that he was perceiving the 50-cycle hum of the electrical devices and conduits in the house. Something had rasped his nervous system to an irritated, preternaturally acute sensitivity. That dream, he thought suddenly. It was the gluon field. The blank eternity of inhuman nothing, the explosion of light, the experience of floating out and away from my body. 'Sit down,' he told the diplomat, pulling out a kitchen chair. 'I'll fix coffee.'
'Thank you.' Bryant Gellner was impatient, but he had clearly decided that compliance was the swiftest road to persuasion. 'I trust we didn't wake your wife.'
As he took milk from the refrigerator, Bill saw for an instant a fuzzy wash of violet light like ocean phosphorescence at its back. 'She's literally slept through earthquakes,' he said. 'Why can't it wait?'
'I don't know,' the UN man said frankly. 'But whatever it is, I have a hunch there are lights going on all over the War Room Big Board.'
The nuclear shield, Bill told himself. Pouring coffee, he was mildly surprised to find himself so calm. I've lived on the San Andreas fault for years at a time without breaking into a sweat. Maybe this is the same.
'A pre-emptive strike? I thought they were our friends now. Not the Chinese, surely?'
'I don't _want_ to know,' Gellner said, his hungry eyes denying it. 'There's a very curious UN flap on, very contained, very tight. None of the hoopla of a ritual scare. I doubt that it's the big one, but someone's remembered leaving the kerosene near the fire. That's a Mach 3 bird they have waiting for you at San Jose. I hope your circadian rhythms are in good shape.'
DelFord stood up. 'Do I need an overcoat?'
'A light suit would be fine.' The diplomat smiled sweetly. 'It's summer down there.'
'Good Christ.'
He woke Selma as he was leaving. 'Big silver bird kidnaps your Willy. I don't know how long I'll be gone. The mad bastards seem to think it's urgent, so I'll doubtless find myself perched on my ass in the middle of Chile twiddling my thumbs for a week. Then they'll decide they meant the other Bill delFord and pack me off home with a set of scenic views and no explanation. I'll call you soonest.' He kissed her, tweaked her fleshy buttocks fondly as he leaned across to turn off the lamp, and departed regretfully. At Ben's door he paused for a moment, and was dumbfounded by the light snores he heard. Adolescents, he thought, shaking his head. Gellner had preceded him out of the house; Bill went into the chilly night air and found the grey limousine, all its lights out, parked several houses away.
The diplomat opened a back door for him. A glass partition sealed the passengers off from the driver, presumably a security device. As his hand touched the vehicle's frame, Bill sensed a mild, soapy texture against his fingers. He stepped back, rapped on the driver's window.
'You've got a short from the battery,' he informed the soldier. 'There's current leaking into the bodywork.'
The driver looked at him steadily and said nothing. Shrugging, Bill climbed in next to Gellner.
'It's a complex heterodyning signal, sir,' the soldier's voice said from a grille in the partition. 'Pink noise. It neutralises bugs, and scrambles maser detection spy-beams bounced off the vehicle.'
DelFord turned and stared at Gellner. 'Golly,' he said. 'Isn't it exciting?'
The helicopter lift to the Air Force base did nothing to improve his mood. He hated the rowdy, clamouring things. After the effortless, nearly silent limousine, the chopper's vulgarity was an affront to the sleeping night. Falling toward earth, they slipped over rows of similar machines waiting neatly for the next convenient opportunity to spray human flesh with flaring petroleum jelly.
A stern, blue-garbed officer met them outside a grey concrete building. He wore a gun at his belt. Gellner tendered documents which were examined routinely. 'Good morning, gentlemen. Mr Gellner, you're requested to call New York. Just go right through.'
They strode along a brightly lit green-grey corridor that managed to convey the dullness of blight. The place was first cousin to every military structure Bill had ever seen; it nauseated him. The diplomat made his call under an opaque plastic privacy hood. A wizened gnome, cap grimy and askew, told delFord that his courier was fuelled and ready for take-off. Gellner returned. 'All clear. I'll see you off.'
In a small bay at the back an electric runabout awaited them, English postbox red. The gnome gestured them in. His collar appeared damp; it drooped. Somehow, in spite of the smooth efficient motor, he managed to make the machine lurch. The five-hundred-metre ride to the jet's cruel wedge was no less eventful. Bill found himself grinning. Although they crossed perfectly flat tarmac, the little man was able to create the impression that they were galloping over rubble or worse.
They climbed out under a sweptback titanium wing and the red vehicle veered into reverse. The gnome sped off without a word, bucking as he went. There was just the merest hint, through the cold dark wind, of a derisive belch.
'Is he always like that?'