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

'We found it,' Lapp said. 'Delicious. Which reminds me. Anyone hungry?'
'Captain, do you think of anything but your belly?' Sutton shook his head in dismay.
Alf was galvanised with questions. 'Why did it try to kill me?'
'An automatic protective system,' Fedorenko said gravely. 'It does not like visitors.'
'But it didn't hurt Mouse?'
'Exactly. We don't know why. Perhaps it recognised that he represented no active threat.'
Acutely, Alf said: 'So you want to get into this ... Vault -- but it won't let you near it?'
'Just so.'
'And the Tanami desert entrance has given you a way to short-circuit its defences.'
'Probably not,' the general said regretfully. 'Your accidental insertion shows that the protective zone extends down to the Gate. Besides, the question is academic. The Gate is now defunct.'
'Huh? Then how do you know that Mouse and I really did -- ?'
'One of our tests seems to have killed it,' Hugh Lapp told him. He bowed sardonically toward Fedorenko. 'The Professor shot it with his ray gun.'
The Russian shrugged, but he was mournful. 'An unhappy by-product of our safety precautions. We could hardly risk another gauge glitch.'
As forcefully as he could, Alf said: 'Hang on. You've run away from me again. Ray gun?'
'Hubert's undergraduate humour,' Fedorenko observed without resentment. 'You must understand, firstly, that the Vault will not tolerate electromagnetic fields in its presence. Atrocious phenomena ensue. Alf, you can be thankful that you failed to take your flashlight into the Vault zone with you.'
'There was enough light from the zone. I left the flashlight with Mouse.'
'Evidently he dropped it when he pursued you into the Gate. We are grossly handicapped in our investigations, you see, for we are obliged to use only rudimentary instruments and methods.'
'I see.' Alf slipped into sarcasm, to avoid facing this latest burst of guilty retrospective terror. 'Such as old-fashioned pre-electronic ray guns.'
Fedorenko inclined his head. 'The merit of a laser beam, Dr Dean, is that it can be transmitted quite a long way, if it is of the appropriate frequency. The pump does not need to be situated near the glitch zone. When we found the Gate you activated, it was still responsive to human proximity.'
An image seared Alf's mind: a huge box-like interior of white light, a vast sphere in its centre. The pseudo-memory flashed off, a neon sign extinguished. 'Serpent's egg,' he mumbled.
'I'm sorry?'
But the image was gone, tangled with scraps of nightmare.
'Nothing,' Alf said. 'I've been hallucinating pretty badly. It was just -- '
Lapp stared at him with interest. 'I wanted to ask you about that, Alf. Any details?'
Beneath his black skin, blood coursed. The flush made his face glow. 'Some. Meaningless. The garbage you get in any nightmare.' Deliberately, he directed his gaze to the Russian physicist. 'You were talking about lasers.'
Lapp nodded almost imperceptibly. The scientist went on at once. 'We wished to establish if the Gate was still tuned to the Vault. Geometric constraints prevented us viewing the steps without sending someone into the defensive zone, and that would not work. Alf, you are the first adult to come out of the zone with your sanity intact. And it would have been equally pointless to send a scout through the Gate, since we had established that it is a one-way trip. So I decided to emplace mirrors along the cavern course, to direct an optical laser pulse on to the roof of the Vault. There, it would be visible from our own access point.'
'You bounced the beam along the tunnel? Then into the Gate, angled parallel to the steps?'
'Precisely.'
'And the laser beam put the Gate out of business?'
'The Gate turned itself off. That is my estimate. Fortunately, the beam was indeed visible for several microseconds. It flashed on the roof of the Vault simultaneously with its passage through the Gate. That distance, in four-dimensional spacetime, is of the order of 600 kilometres. Had the beam shone directly through space, such a journey would have taken one five-hundredth of a second.'
Mirthlessly, Alf said, 'At the speed of light.'
'Quite. In reality, our calibrated instruments showed that it covered the interval instantaneously.'
'You can bet your ass Victor was pleased,' the astronaut said. 'He's the reigning champ in non-local physics. The quantum connectivity Czar.'
Another piece jumped into place. Of course. He'd heard Fedorenko's name last year, as a hot Nobel Prize candidate.
'Unfortunately,' Sutton said, with a disgruntled glance at the Russian, 'that item of data cost us. The Gate went off and stayed off. We're back to square one.'
No wonder the blacks had been terrified and awe-struck by the Gate, Alf told himself. One-way, it was lethal. Vividly he remembered the warning signs on the tunnel wall, the ancient aboriginal interdictions. A dozen questions clamoured for his attention. Why had the extraterrestrial engineers placed their exit at the end of a natural tube worming through an escarpment in the middle of one of the world's most inhospitable deserts? Was that location imposed on them, perhaps, by some geometric law of hyperspace? Were there, after all, authentic 'places of power' which an advanced science might link together?
Or was his scale wrong? Even mountains creep and buckle and erode given sufficient time. With premonitory trepidation he asked, 'Have you established the age of the Vault?'
'Not the Vault.' Fedorenko pursed his lips. 'The Gate roughly, yes. We've taken extensive mineral samples. Radiological estimates put the worked surface of the Tanami tunnel at some 60 million years BP. Yes, Alf, I felt that way when I saw the report. It is simply beyond the imagination. But the figure is, if anything, conservative.'
All the certitudes of Alf's professional life seemed to skid, to slide away. Oh Jesus, he thought. I imagined that my hypothesis of an embedded Rhaetosaurus fossil was radical, at the boundaries of credibility. And in reality the Rainbow Serpent was a machine, for the love of God! A machine erected when this bleached heartland steamed with hot swamp, when the dinosaurs I sought were browsing like voracious tanks in the brackish seas of Central Australia.
His heart had accelerated. It smacked in the bruised cage of his chest, drove blood in painful jolts through throat, wrists, groin. He closed his eyes. For a dreadful moment he thought that once again he was on the verge of snapping free of his body, evaporating out of his damaged flesh to hover above them all in a blue sphere of light.
Desperately he said: 'The Tanami cavern might not be the only Gate exit connected with your Vault. Have you considered that?'
Lapp laughed. In a cadaverous voice he intoned: 'Beware the Bermuda Triangle.' More soberly he said: 'Hey, are you okay? Maybe you've had enough for one day.'
'There's a place my mob call the Ruined City,' Alf said, clinging to the restraints of reason, to the limitations of his body. His heart gradually slowed with his slow, dogged words. 'Burruinju. The Malanugga-nugga used to live in the vicinity. They've been absorbed into other tribes now, what remains of them. Blood-thirsty bastards they were, famous for raiding the women of their neighbours. We weren't all stalwart Noble Savages.' His lips peeled back. 'It's terrible country, I drove through it once. Worse than the Tanami, worse than Simpson's Desert. All sharp cliffs, granite, stone escarpments, wind screaming like animals. I think you might find another Gate there.'
He swallowed hard. 'There are documented reports. Lights. Incredibly bright, flickering on and off all across the bloody cliff face. Everything else dead black at night except the stars. Naturally, as a trained anthropologist with a white man's degree, I wrote it all off. Superstition. Jesus.'
General Sutton said without hesitation: 'Electric lights. A mineral survey team.'
Wearily, Alf said, 'Impossible. The reports go back too far. And I've spoken to a man who saw them, Phillip Waipuldanya. He was an ambulance attendant, a skilled mechanic. Also a hunter, trained in the traditional techniques. You couldn't ask for a better observer. And it scared the shit out of him.'
'Might have been worse.' Looking intently into Alf's eyes, gripping his gaze, Lapp said: 'It could have scared him out of his body.'
Alf felt his heart cramp, falter for seconds, lurch again into action.
'What?' Fingernails drove into his palms. 'What?'
The astronaut sat down on the bed's edge, touched his arm lightly. 'I know,' Lapp told him. 'It happened to me too.'