"DeChancie,.John.-.Skyway.02.-.Red.Limit.Freeway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dechancie John)

Red Limit Freeway

John DeChancie (1984)
~
Something tall was standing in the shadows farther down the passageway.
I slowly took Susan's torch from my pocket.
I played the beam of the torch on it and my heart dropped into my stomach.
"Grrreetings, Jake-friend. We have found you at last."
A nightmare in gray-green chitin, fully two and a half meters tall, the Reticulan took a step forward. His zoomlens eyes rotated slightly to get me in better focus. The complex apparatus of his mouth worked in and out, up and down in a rapid and silent sewing-machine motion.
Twrrrl and his hunting companions had followed me all the way from Terran Maze. Members of a Reticulan Snatchgang, bagging the quarry and dispatching it in a horrific ceremony of vivisection was their only concern.
And I was the Sacred Quarry.
~

In Memory of
Gene DeChancie

* * *

THERE'S NO SPEED LIMIT
ON THE FREEWAY TO THE END
OF THE UNIVERSE

Jake McGraw has accidentally discovered what may be the legendary Roadmap to the Big Bang. But how much longer can Jake keep his battered starrig rolling with half the galaxy after him--from insectoid aliens and ubiquitous Roadbugs to the diabolical syndicate TATOO?

Perpetually, if Jake knows what's good for him. Because there are no safe truck stops on the multidimensional highway where anything goes and only one law prevails:
THOU SHALT NOT OBSTRUCT THE ROAD.

Chapter 1

There they were, up ahead-the Trees at the Edge of the Sky. That's what Winnie called them. Other people called them different things: Kerr-Tipler objects, tollbooths, noncatastrophic singularities, portal arrays . . .
I called them cylinders. That's what they were, big ones, some as high as five kilometers. They were lined up on both sides of the roadway like impossibly huge fenceposts, their color impossibly black, blacker than the interstellar space they bent and twisted and warped to their creators' ends, and to our benefit. Everything about them was incredible. They were said to be spinning at unimaginable speeds, though their featureless surfaces gave no perceivable confirmation of this. A few experiments had been done on them, measuring Doppler shifts of infalling particles and Hawking radiation flying out. But the Colonial Authority had a long-standing ban on the publication of data and even theoretical studies concerning the portals. One only had rumors to go by. And the rumors were: The results were impossible.
Their rotational speeds worked out to be faster than light. It couldn't be, but that's what the numbers said.
"What's our speed, Sam?"
"Oh, we're moseying along nicely. If you'd care to move your eyeballs a few millimeters to the right, you'd see for yourself."
"You know I can't read instruments and drive at the same time." "
"Good Lord, and I was just about to offer you some chewing gum."
"Oh, cut the merte, Sam."
"Is that any way to speak to your father?" Then Sam guffawed, in that scratchy/liquid synthesised voice of his--if the oxymoron can be forgiven, it's the only way I can express what the sound is like. In no way does it resemble my deceased father's voice, except in emotional tone and inflection. I didn't have a recording of Sam to pattern the waveforms after when I ordered the voice-output software for the rig's computer.
Sam went on, "We're right in the groove. Forget the numbers, I've got her on speed lock."
I glanced at the digital telltales, the array of numbers suspended in the air at eye level and at about thirty degrees to either side of my line-of-sight straight ahead positioned so as to hide in the retinal blind spot, they were unobtrusive until looked at directly. I usually had them turned off; --if you moved your head a lot they seemed like pesky fireflies flitting about.
"Okay, fine. Everybody strapped in?"
Roland Yee was in the shotgun seat. "Check," he said.
"I think we're all secure back here," John Sulcuma-Tayler reported.
I chanced a look back. John, Susan D' Archangelo, and Darla Petrovsky nВe Vance were in harnesses in the back seats. The cab accommodated five comfortably. I heard squabbling in the aft-cabin--a little living space useful for long hauls.
"Hey, Carl!" I yelled. "Is Lori strapped down back there?"
"Like trying to hog-tie a--give me your damn arm!--like trying to wrassle a she-cat!"
"Lori!" I shouted. "Be a good girl!"
"I'm okay, for God's sake. Let me--"
"Gotcha!"
."I'm okay, I'm telling you!" .