"Eric Brown - The Phoenix Experiment" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Eric)

warm night air.
He decided to set up a camp bed on the balcony, in the hope that his
dreams of late had been in part a product of the claustrophobia he had
experienced in the city. But the open air, the mild sea breeze, could do
nothing to alleviate the guilt, and in the early hours he awoke in a sweat
and watched his daughter's smiling face vanish into the night.

He took to going on long walks early in the mornings, so as to avoid the
patients who were active mainly in the afternoons. He would spend the rest
of the day reading, or drinking, or watching television. It was as if he
was purposefully filling his head with trivia, and allotting only the two
hours he spent walking for the serious consideration of his circumstances.

At the funeral, and its aftermath, he had been unable to show the
slightest sign of grief. Many of his acquaintances assumed that he was
still in shock, but his father had seen through his silent facade and
called Fuller cold and emotionless, accused him of feeling nothing for his
dead daughter.
Only later did he begin to experience the guilt - not so much at being
unable to grieve at her death, rather at his inability to show her more
affection during the short time that she was alive. He had kept his
distance, remained aloof - believing that by doing so he could insulate
himself from the hurt that inevitably followed emotional involvement. He
believed that with involvement came the fear of another's mortality, and
from that the reminder of one's own - and Fuller feared his own death more
than anything else. Over the years, he had succeeded in distancing himself
from everyone with whom he had contact, his daughter included. He was
rewarded by the inability to suffer anguish at his bereavement. Only now
was he coming to realise that the quality of his daughter's short life had
suffered from his apathy.

One morning, after a long walk, Fuller encountered a patient on the beach
beneath the cliffs. He came to think of the brief meeting as prophetic,
though not at the time.
He saw the woman as he came around the headland, paused and considered
retracing his steps so as to avoid contact. She was staring out to sea,
with her back to him, and he decided to walk quickly past her towards the
steps cut into the cliff-face.
She stood in the wet sand, her hands slotted into the back pockets of her
denim cut-offs, a short white tee-shirt emphasizing her tan. She was a
crew-cut blonde with the figure of a small boy, and it occurred to Fuller,
with mounting shock that, if she were so physically perfect, then her
debilitation had to be cerebral.
Then he became aware of the subcutaneous network, the threads of gold that
embroidered the surface of her arms and legs, the small of her back and
belly between cotton shirt and the frayed waistline of her denims.
She turned and caught him staring. Her face was young and open. Fuller
tried to hurry past, but her question stopped him.
"Are you one of them?" Her voice was transistorised, straight from the
larynx, while her full lips smiled and her green eyes stared at him.