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

The picture had jumped again. Now the camera was crawling slowly around the Alpha base, jiggling up and down and in and out of focus as the clumsy servomechs tried to cope with the slippery glass surface.
'Hey!' Bill cried, and immediately felt foolish.
The Soviet machine moved stupidly on, past the great dark jagged rent. Then earth ground controllers had responded, stopped it, turned it gingerly back. A searchlight sprang into life. The robot lumbered into the airless, lifeless, devastated structure.
Time ceased for delFord as he followed the slow, careful investigation of the crippled complex. He forgot he sat in a UN courier jet hurtling across the North Pole; he forgot how strange, indeed daunting, it was that he should be privileged to view this incredibly secret film. From time to time the astronaut beside him commented quietly on the picture, detailing various conjectures concerning this melted lump or that peculiar shape. Bill said nothing at all, lost in appalled wonder, until the searchlight caught the great, glimmering, cloudless map.
'The earth. But the continents -- '
'As it was during the late Palaeogene. As you can see, most of Europe is under water. The Low Countries, and Germany and Poland, are inundated. There's a seaway from France to Russia. The Americas still haven't joined, and much of their coastal regions are drowned. Australia's only slowly breaking away from Antarctica. The Himalayas are being built as India collides with Asia. It's a remarkable map; you can't tell at this distance but it's holographic and can be magnified without loss of detail to the degree that single trees and animals can be identified. It's told us more about the pongid predecessors of _Ramapithecus_ and other primitive hominids than all the fossil records of paleoarcheology. But of course the most significant feature is -- '
' -- that violet flare of light in central Australia.'
'Exactly. We infer that the site so designated was a base belonging either to the beings who constructed Selene Alpha, or to those who destroyed them.'
Bill felt his pulse pounding wildly as the robot camera tracked more closely across the vast map to zoom in on the point of light. The nimbus glowed steadily around a huge pyramidal pile of eroded sandstone, a shaped mountain. 'That's some rock,' he said.
'Uluru,' the astronaut told him. 'It's a natural monolith in the middle of nowhere. The sand has cut it down a lot since then. The alien base itself is nearly three kilometres under Uluru. It's protected by something that makes our gluon shield look like mosquito netting. We call it the Vault.' Lapp looked down at his hands for a moment, spread his fingers wide, closed them convulsively into fists. 'Bill, thirty-six men have died so far trying to get into the Vault. A couple of weeks ago, an adolescent autistic boy blithely walked out of the place -- into our tunnel, three fucking klicks deep in the earth -- and told us we were going about it all wrong. Well, not "told" exactly. He's barely capable of speech. But he's very hot with a pencil. If he was a member of the Spiritualists' Union they'd call what he's doing automatic writing, and take up a collection.
'The only problem is, Doctor, we don't have the faintest idea what it is he's trying to convey.'
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*Three: A Conclave of the Dead*
*6. Uluru*
Poor Selma, Bill delFord thought distinctly. Caught in that cold bath for days on end with her toe, swollen tremendously, jammed in the plug-hole. The courier's indirect lighting brightened as he lay blinking on his tilted couch. Reaching up, he brushed the small silver-chloride electrodes from his forehead and consulted his watch. God only knows what time it is at whatever longitude we're racing down, he thought. He hadn't corrected his timepiece. With the aid of the sleep-induction electrodes, he'd rested supremely well for a little over four hours. Despite the flat, conditioned air, with its taints of plastic and alloys, Bill felt the wholesome recovery rightfully due to nine hours in his own bed.
A rufous symphony in abstract expressionism was displayed on the ground monitor: red, mottled desert, long rounded shadows of summer daybreak. Bill was hungry. He went forward, searching for wrapped sandwiches in the discreet bar. To his delight, he found several cartons of milk, and a turkey-on-cracked-wheat. The automatic timer had roused Hugh Lapp when he turned back with his breakfast.
'Plain milk or chocolate?'
The astronaut reached unerringly for the brown carton. 'Where's the hot dog?'
'You're sick, Lapp, sick. Is this tomorrow or yesterday morning?'
'Beats me, Doctor. The earth's flat. I know -- I've seen it from the outside.'
An amber light began flashing above the display screens. A crisp voice told them: 'We're on the fringes of the heavy weather now, gentlemen. Better strap up and hold tight. It'll be a rough ride in.'
'Thanks, Carl,' Lapp said. 'How long before we land?'
'Five, ten minutes, sir. There's a wild old storm blowing down there. They have so many cross-winds this morning we'll go the final thousand metres in Vertical Descent Attitude.'
Already the hull was thrumming as the edges of the weather buffeted the jet. They lost altitude and speed. On the exterior screen the parched red earth became obscured by vast cumulo-nimbus clouds.
'I thought this was a desert.'
'The Vault,' Lapp said. 'It doesn't like being goosed. Fortunately the EM field disruption doesn't extend this far up or we'd be dead.'
The engines bellowed as they dropped toward the thundercaps. Bill gulped his sandwich and grabbed the arms of his couch. They fell into blackness.
Had the jet possessed portholes, the morning sunlight would have been whipped away from them exactly as it had from the screen. It was necessary for Bill to remind himself of that fact, for the screen somehow had lost its power to convince. Its heavy grey might as well have indicated a malfunction in the circuitry. I don't want to believe it, he realised.
His stomach lurched, and his hands went into the air. It's trying to kill us, he thought irrationally. For seconds they dropped in the air pocket, then they were flying normally again, battling against the purely natural force and power unleashed in every storm. He gave the astronaut an unconvincing grin.
'Sorry about this, Bill. Usually we come through the weather zone in heavy trucks, but my superiors thought no time should be lost getting you here. You can start worrying after we've landed.'
Then they were through the cloud, and rain was streaking the camera lens. Thousands of metres below, the land was a dark sodden obscurity. Lights danced across the picture, were lost again. Had he seen, for an instant, a great black kite-shaped mound, distorted to a wedge, its edges eroded by an eternity of scouring sand?
'We're very close to the Rock facility now,' the pilot told them. 'I'm rotating the jets through 90 degrees for setdown, so don't be alarmed if we drop a little.'
The engines faded to a whimper, letting the howl of the storm enter the layers of insulated hull. The drone became a growl, picked up power again, and the courier settled vertically into the nest of brilliant lights that had swung slowly into the screen. The sensation was little different from a fast descent in an elevator well. There was a slight jar and the engines screamed, then died.
'It's still pelting down, gentlemen,' the faceless pilot told them. 'I've ordered a plastic umbilicus. If you just stay seated for a moment we'll make base without getting our tootsies damp.'
'Fine, Carl,' the astronaut said. 'Thanks for the smooth ride.'
The external viewer showed two drenched ground staff, water cascading from their yellow sou'westers and macs, guiding one end of a huge concertinaed plastic cylinder toward the jet. At its other end loomed a coppery geodesic dome the size of a football field.
'I'd have been just as happy with a pair of stout umbrellas,' Bill grumbled.
'They fall into the way of treating people on these kinds of planes as celebrities.'
Bill blew his nose. The sound of heavy rain persuaded him that nothing had changed with the translocation of hemispheres, that winter had skidded ahead of him with its gloomy burden of colds and drab skies. The door swung open. He followed the astronaut into the dead, smell-numbing greyness of the umbilical tube. At the far end, a pair of beefy military men waited for them.
'General Vladislav Logunovich Sevastyianov, Colonel Thomas Chandler, this is Dr Bill delFord, our expert in weird shit.'
Chandler grinned. He was a ruddy man, mesomorphic and sleepy-looking. 'Your brief sojourn in California has corrupted you, Hugh. Welcome to the madhouse, Bill.'
The Russian shook delFord's hand perfunctorily. 'I am delighted to meet you, Doctor. Perhaps you would enjoy some breakfast?' He had a West Point accent, and Bill came close to laughing outright.
The dome was enormous. A wide access corridor circled the perimeter, branching off into specialised areas clearly designated by signs in Russian and English. Evidently, security distinctions prevailed even among the many men moving in UN uniforms about the corridor. Soldiers with open holsters stood at the entrance to certain passages, checking papers before permitting entry.
The Russian general, as far as Bill could make out, was in charge of surface operations. An American counterpart controlled all the on-the-spot investigations into the Vault, at the end of the prodigious tunnel that plunged back and forth more than two kilometres into the earth. Colonel Chandler headed the US team on the surface, and doubtless the Russians were equally represented below: revived Cold War protocol, Bill thought, in Dante's Inferno.
Nor could that be the whole story. Every three months or so, the entire bunch swapped roles, and there were frequent surface furloughs for scientists and military working in the claustrophobic horrors of the deeps.
Bill found the whole place increasingly distasteful. He responded, inevitably, to the faint background zing of excitement, the authentic note of nervous delight in risk and the determinate response to risk which every bar-room warrior tried to recapture from the single great episode of his drab life. But Bill had always hated regimentation, and the sight of this well-oiled military machine stifled him, transformed him into no more than an object of impersonal scrutiny. It was hard not to feel that if some functionary decided he constituted a threat to the place he might be wiped out of existence without the smallest trace of compunction. It was the opposite of Zen egolessness. It was a vile exercise of inordinate power to a machine's end. The fact that the Vault itself, relic of some unspeakably ancient paranoia, might effect the same unthinking extermination was not comparable. The Vault was precisely alien, without human intention. To find the same qualities in people always made his skin crawl.
They paused outside a door marked: DO NOT ENTER -- AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. A pair of recessed television cameras studied them from the corridor ceiling. The colonel stopped a passing private, turned to delFord.
'You must be uncomfortable after your trip. You can take a shower in your quarters, have a bite to eat, maybe catch up on your sleep.'
Bill glanced at Lapp. 'Well, I could use some coffee, but if you -- '
'That's a good idea, Bill,' the Captain said briskly. 'I'll be in conference for an hour or so, so make yourself at home. You'll have the room next to mine -- I'll give you a yell when I'm through. Just one thing.' He tapped delFord on the chest. 'If you do have a shower, go easy on the water. We're in the middle of Australia's biggest desert.'