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

Without any need to speak explicitly, they had bridged the gulf. It was untenable that Lapp might be lying, or intend some other meaning. Alf said: 'You've been in there.'
'Not inside the Vault. Something similar, on a miniature scale. We have teams in Russia and the States working to duplicate the Vault's defensive fields. That's where I've been. I don't look forward to going back into it again.'
'It didn't happen.' Alf stared ferociously into the man's clear eyes. 'Hallucination.'
'It happened,' Lapp told him. 'Maybe it's hallucination. Harris Lowenthal insists that it is. He's our principal civilian psych consultant. I think I have news for him. It was real.'
'We left our bodies.'
'Sure felt like it.'
'delFord,' Alf said faintly.
'What?'
With animus, the anthropologist snarled: 'God damn it, you heard me. We left our bodies. I don't believe it.'
'Yes,' Lapp said. 'What did you say after that?'
Alf stared. 'I didn't say anything.'
'You said "delFord". William delFord? Do you mean you've already studied the OOBE literature? That's a rather strange coincidence.'
'What the fuck are you talking about? I don't know any delFord. And what in hell is "ooby"?'
From the corner of the room, General Sutton snapped: 'Out-of-body-experience. O-O-B-E. Lunatic fringe. Occult pseudo-science. Captain Lapp, you're out of line. Dr Lowenthal has accounted adequately for those hallucinations.'
Lapp stood his ground. 'He doesn't satisfy me, Dwayne. And I've been inside the gluon field. I know what it felt like. I believe Alf Dean's experience corroborates mine. And if delFord is still working on OOBE, we could usefully bring him in on this. Christ, yes, he's the perfect choice. I've read his Huxley reports. He's the only one in the OOBE regiment who's making any sense.'
'Are you seriously recommending that we contract Bill delFord? Hugh, you shock me. The man's a, an anarchist!'
'Of whom do we speak?' asked Fedorenko.
'A West Coast nut who might have been a powerful research innovator,' Sutton said, like a man personally affronted. 'We worked together briefly. He's a transplanted Englishman, came over here, uh, to the States I mean, in the early seventies. He did some very good psychophysical work in conjunction with specialists from the Department of Defense.'
With a touch of mockery the Russian said, 'Really? An anarchist?
'That was later. The hippies got to him. Before that he'd married an American girl, got tenure at UCLA -- and then walked away from it with his brain bent by New Age bullshit. He directs a place in California, Big Sur someplace, full of hairy freaks running away from the cruel hard world. It sickens me to my belly.'
In some puzzlement, Fedorenko asked Alf, 'How do you know of this delFord?' Ponderously, he proposed: 'The anthropology of "hippies"?'
'Why is everyone asking _me?_' cried Alf in exasperation. 'I've never heard of the bugger in my life!'
'But you mentioned his name.'
'You're crazy. It _is_ a lunatic asylum.'
With abrupt decision, Hugh Lapp told Sutton: 'I'm going to do just that, Dwayne, I think delFord could provide just the degree of off-centre impetus this Project needs. A touch of English to keep the ball spinning.' He uttered his own preemptive groan, but went on seriously: 'Don't you find it significant that Dr Dean raised delFord's name -- and instantly blocked his short-term memory of doing it?'
'Not in the least. You mentioned hallucinations of leaving the physical body. Unconsciously, he then recalled the name of a self-styled "authority" on the topic.'
Alf objected strenuously. 'But I've never read or heard of -- '
'Right now, I believe we've taxed Dr Dean sufficiently. In fact I'm astonished that the medics haven't been in here yet to chase us out.'
'It's your ferocious reputation, General. They're quaking in their boots.'
'Me?' Sutton raised his eyebrows. 'It's only psychic charlatans I eat before breakfast.' He turned to Alf. 'Accept my best wishes for your recovery, Dr Dean. I'm returning to the States tonight, so I mightn't have a chance to see you again. No doubt, however, you'll continue to suffer the attentions of these two.' He opened the door.
When they had all gone, Alf ground his large teeth together in furious bafflement. At least his headache had let up. He felt disabled, shockingly weak. The door opened again.
'Just one thing, Alf,' Hugh Lapp's voice said apologetically. 'I meant to mention it earlier. We're making arrangements for you to see Mouse later today.'
Thanks. I don't see why there's been any need for delay.'
The captain stepped into his field of vision. 'The boy has been behaving oddly. Nothing to worry about, though. He's a nice kid, I've been spending some time with him. Tragic.'
'Yeah.' With a deliberate show of insensitivity, Alf added, 'Fortunately he's tractable. I can take him with me on field trips without losing him. Until recently.'
'Ease up on yourself, buddy. You could hardly be expected to take precautions against a teleportation system.'
'I never should have left him alone.' Alf caressed the sweat on his face. After a silence he said, 'He's a good kid. We have him placed with a new stimulus enrichment program they're developing at Monash University, but they insist that it does him good to get out here occasionally with me.'
'Lowenthal diagnosed Non-Specific Cerebral Dysfunction,' Lapp said dryly.
'Dr Fish used the same term. Wonderful, isn't it? Pinpoints Mouse's problem precisely.' Alf exhaled. 'His mother Eleanor was the last of the Goth punks. All black make-up and New Age claptrap and telepathic whales and promiscuous raves. Industrial quantities of Ecstasy for a while, then LSD. She was knocking down thousands of micrograms a day when she got impregnated by some nameless tongue-pierced wonder. Of course, she considered the contraceptive pill an unnatural chemical, the stupid bitch. She kept dropping LSD doses of that magnitude during the five months it took her to realise she wasn't just getting back her puppyfat.'
'Christ. Let's hear it for good ole dead Doc Leary.'
'The acid got into Mouse through her blood stream. He's been on a constant trip from the day he was born. Zonked, smashed, flying out of his mind. What there is of it. She thought he was going to be the new Messiah. My white sister.'
The sheet had wrinkled and slipped from Alf's torso. The black man stared down at his own glistening chest. Incision welts made his flesh a barbaric shield.
They take the children and slit their bodies with rusty old razor blades, Alf thought distantly, alienated equally from the world of his genes and that of his adopted culture. Of course, no doubt razor blades are a technical advance over the ancient fire-hardened stick. Then they pack the open wound with dry soil and ashes, to contain infection and produce handsome, bubbling scarring. This is my people's notion of decoration, of manhood, he told himself.
He did not notice the astronaut leave, or hear the sick bay door close quietly on his confusion and misery.
--------
*Two: The Belly of the Whale*
*4. California*
Down in the Pacific's flecked jaws, corroded by spume, a rusty automobile shell hung on the rocks, a gutted turtle. Bill delFord leaned out from the Institute's cantilevered deck, solid timber against his bulging belly, and imagined he felt gusts of spray rising a third of a kilometre to blow in his face. Rain had ceased, but the dull, drenched ocean punished Big Sur under a winter sky.
I'm getting crotchety in my old age, delFord told himself. Like a talkback announcer's lagged tape, the reflection cycled in his brain. Its pseudo-objectivity shocked him, catching him unawares.
Jesus, I'm not that old, he thought. But it was forty years and more since he'd teased the panties off his first girl in the back seat of a lumpy, ancient Morris Oxford. He grinned at the memory. It had nearly shot his Histology finals to rubble. What could compete with that moist welcome? Certainly not the nephritic truth that the parietal layer of Bowman's capsule, into which the glomerulus is invaginated, is continuous with the glomerular epithelium.