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

With panic that soon shifted to bile, he sketched them shaky diagrams of his route. When they brought him large scale ordnance maps, he pin-pointed the place where he had left The Beast. Their faces conveyed no trace of belief or scepticism and so he was obliged to read their professional impassivity as hostile rejection of his truth. His anger mounted. All his life, despite his privileged circumstances, white sons of bitches had met his gaze with a chilly filter to mask out the spontaneous warmth they freely offered each another.
This version of it was worse, but still he knew its kind of old. Trained neural receptors in his black skin were sensitive to the temperature.
'Although you are a full-blood Australian Aborigine, your nephew happens to be a white retard.'
'That's right. It's a long story, and none of your business.' Constricted rage throttled his larynx.
'I believe the evaluation of pertinency is our domain, Dr Dean.'
'By what right, you nosy bastard? I demand to speak to a solicitor. And what the hell is your _name?_'
'Names are unimportant. I'm sorry, but you cannot be permitted to contact an attorney at this point in time. The entire station is under the quarantine of military security.'
'By whose orders?'
The man sighed. 'By the orders of the Australian Government, under the auspices of the United Nations.'
'Bullshit.'
'Use your brain, man. You've seen American and Russian personnel here working side by side. Doesn't that prompt some estimate of the gravity of this operation?' He caught himself, and smiled. 'But of course you know all this anyway. How else could you have gotten into the Vault?'
Was he locked into some farcical lunatic asylum? 'I don't know what you mean by the Vault. Look, it's obvious that Mouse and I stumbled over some fucking stupendous secret research project in the desert. Holograms in the middle of ancient caves, whatever. Is it an extraterrestrial artefact? It must be. The Rainbow Serpent data goes back too far.'
Dryly, the man said: 'And it was the Rainbow Serpent you were looking for, of course. Not the Vault. By pure accident you crept into the middle of the most extensively guarded installation in this hemisphere. In the world, maybe.'
'I don't know what you are talking about,' Alf shouted. Migraine clamped his brow, hammered down into his nasal septum. 'Yes, I was looking for the Rainbow Serpent, if you wish to be simple-minded about it. Yes, I was doing so in this locality. For the love of God, I've drawn you a map. 250 kilometres west of Tennant Creek, 280 south-east of Wave Hill. Right here, you buffoon! Unless you've moved Mouse and me to one of your spy satellite ground stations while we were unconscious.'
The security man considered Alf impassively. 'In fact, we haven't moved you very far at all. Several klicks vertically, in essence.'
Alf slapped his sheeted knee in disgust. 'Do you take me for a fool? We're on the ground. I _have_ travelled in a plane, you know. Don't let my skin fool you. I'm not an ignorant savage.'
'Dr Dean,' the man assured him, 'if I thought you were an ignorant savage we would be conducting this interview according to rather different rules.'
The door opened. The man who entered spoke with marked Russian accent. 'Search team Four has located the vehicle, Colonel. Its position was as indicated.' He handed the intelligence man a folder, saluted and closed the door.
'Hmm.' Flicking pages swiftly, the American glanced once at Alf. 'Extraordinary.' He rose. 'Thank you for your co-operation, Dr Dean.' And he was gone, leaving Alf with an open mouth. Migraine closed on him. Brutally, he thumped the button beside his bed. An orderly appeared almost instantly. Within minutes, the anthropologist was asleep, his headache scrubbed away by the same drugs which banished anger, bafflement and thought itself.
The pain in his throat had eased when he woke, and he was hungry. Oddly enough he felt no craving for a cigarette. His watch was still missing, but light came in a parallelogram slanting from his open door. A remote drumming sounded, as always, above the hush of the air conditioners. It reminded him of something commonplace, but his rational interpretative cortex blocked the association.
Vertically, the man had said. That could mean several kilometres downward, of course. And Alf's original wild speculation had been that the alien device was a teleportation portal, linking the Tanami desert tunnel with some other location on earth. So it could have shifted him to, say, the Himalayas. Had the legend of the Yeti arisen because, over the centuries, a series of foolhardy naked black men had appeared magically, to freeze in the howling snows? But the man had also said that authorisation had come from the Australian government. There were no mountains three kilometres high in Australia.
Alf climbed unsteadily from the bed, shaking his head at his own bad smell. He called from the door for breakfast. The light in the corridor seemed to flicker oddly with a marginal oscillating haze.
Before he had finished digesting the food, the brass arrived. His previous interrogator was not one of their number. Indeed Alf recognised none of them.
'The changing of the guard,' he said sourly.
One of them wore stars, and looked exhausted. He extended his hand. 'I'm Dwayne Sutton, Dr Dean. Scientific liaison. I apologise for the peremptory treatment you've had from us in the last few days. How are you feeling?'
'Wary, General.' There were sympathetic chuckles. 'I want to see my nephew.'
'Of course you do. We'll arrange a visit very shortly. You needn't worry, he's in good hands.'
'With a tube down his throat and a drip in his arm?'
Sutton's tanned expression was horrified. 'My God, no. Haven't they told you? He's fine. You're the one who's been worrying us, Alf. Can I call you Alf?'
'Call me Jackie if you feel like it. Just let me out of this bloody prison.'
'Oh.' The general was nonplussed. 'I understood your name was -- '
'My name is Alf, for Christ's sake. Why am I being detained?'
'Basically, Alf, because you've managed the equivalent of stumbling into the middle of the Manhattan Project with no security clearance and no warning given.' Sutton gave a genuine grin. 'For which we have to thank you. Although Victor here might not,' he added, with an attempt at joviality. 'Your arrival in the Vault caused his three best physicists to abandon reductionism in favour of miracles.'
'Not even my three worst physicists,' objected the white-haired man at the foot of the bed, 'lose sleep worrying about materialism. As for miracles, you are getting me confused with General Sawyer.'
Sutton stiffened very slightly. 'General Sawyer's religious convictions are really none of our concern, Victor.'
The Russian shrugged. To Alf he said, 'Good morning, Doctor. I am Fedorenko. It is true that you have set the fox among the hens in my department.' He fetched forward the burly fellow at his side. 'And this is Captain Hubert Lapp, of the NASA Shuttle team. Hugh and I have some questions we would like to pose, if you feel recovered enough to help us.'
Alf regarded each in turn, without warmth. 'Your nameless colleague filled a tape-recorder with answers. To date I haven't managed to prize the simplest item of information out of anyone. Let's see if we can start by balancing the scoreboard.'
Sutton helped himself to a glass of fresh orange juice from the bedside tray. 'Sure. A good beginning might be the Gate -- the device you found in the Tanami desert. You must have realised by now that it wasn't built by human beings.'
Literally, Alf experienced a jolt through his body. Intellectually he had been driven to that conclusion, emotionally he had walled off the insight, denied it, ridiculed his own imagination. Hearing the proposition endorsed by an establishment figure like Sutton was more than startling. It was physically horrendous. He sagged against his pillows, face chilled.
'Oh my God. And I just stepped straight into it. I left Mouse there alone and walked through it.'
'I assure you, Dr Dean,' Fedorenko said with concern, 'the boy is perfectly safe. It was with his assistance that we got you out of the Vault. You have cause to be proud of him. And grateful.' He paused, and then added: 'Had he not been there to get you to medical aid, you would have died, you see.'
It came back: scraps of nightmare, shards of madness. Screaming pain and the breath snatched from his blazing lungs, the steps upward into a strange light, falling, falling endlessly, whips of flame running back and forth into a matrix of cold clarity, infinite connection, a billion voices speaking together in a thousand tongues, the dragons -- Closing his eyes, Alf denied the memories. It had not happened that way. He had _not_ left his body...
Shivering, he hugged himself. 'What did it do to me?' he asked in a thin voice.
'It moved you through space,' said Fedorenko. 'It shifted you 600 kilometres in no time at all. It put you into a place we term the Vault.'
Abruptly, a lot of the pieces slotted together. In the centre of the pattern a void remained, but its periphery was whole and beyond argument. Alf Dean knew where he was. The political rumours had been correct. There was a covert military base in Central Australia.
He exhaled. 'I see. You've known about the alien installation for years.'
'Only the Vault,' Sutton told him. 'Not the Teleport Gate. Not until you and the child fell through it.'
'You've been out to the cavern?'
'We followed your directions,' Lapp said. With a grin, the astronaut said: 'You might be pleased to know that we've brought your Land Rover in to the station. Slung her from a chopper and lifted her in here.'
That piece of news was absurdly gratifying. Alf laughed out loud. 'Wonderful. I always swore The Beast could fly if you handled her right.' He honked into his handkerchief, tucked it back under his pillow, considered them with greater cordiality. 'You might ask your maintenance man to go over the radiator for me. There's a hole in it, full of boiled egg.'