"Joseph Delaney - Lords Temporal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Joseph)

LORDS TEMPORAL by Joseph H Delaney.


Chapter One
There is nothing quite so terrible as a big city on,a cold night. By day at least there are people to panhan-dle,
vehicles to dodge, cops to avoid, chances to duck inside store foyers and warm up a bit. It is a shade less
lonely.
These distractions flee with the sun, leaving streets so silent that the crunch of a foot on dirty gray snow
sounds like thunder. The people leave for warm, com-fortable homes elsewhere in the sprawling city and
lock the doorways of their stores with collapsible steel gates studded with padlocks. They trust to luck that
when the sun comes up again the show windows will still be intact; that out of dim shadows will come no
thief with the determination to break in, or that if one does he will be quickly caught by vigilant police on
patrol.
This was Wyckoffs world. New York City, 2069 A.p. He shared it with perhaps half a million others as
unfortunate as himself, who had no homes, no jobs, and who lacked the capability to get out of the north
when the frost came.
For most of the year the street was not too bad. Wyckoffknew his jungle well. Every season was unique,
bringing both new rules and new opportunities. He liked winter the least, because it was physically the
2 Joseph H. Delaney
hardest and the pickings so abysmally slim. Some days it was all he could do to get enough to eat. And seldom in the
dead of winter could he accumulate enough coins to buy a flop. The flophouse operators knew the desperation the
cold bred in their customers and raised the rates as the temperature fell.
So, those who could pay, did. The others just kept going all night or, if they were really badly off, de-scended into the
subways or the Mission hostels.
Wyckoff huddled out of the wind, standing in a dark-ened doorway half a block from the nearest light, and tried to
make up his mind what to do with the rest of the evening. It had not yet gotten really coldтАФthe temperature was still in
the high twentiesтАФbut a look up at the sky told him this would not last long. The night was comparatively clear, and
stars could be seen even through the heavy smoke and haze. There were no clouds to hold the planet's heat.
He felt in his pocket with fingers stiffened by the cold, counting coins gathered during the day. There were so few of
them; no chance of getting in anywhere warm with what he could afford to pay.
Not so long ago he had been lucky enough to have a hole beneath a demolished building, where a couple of small,
dank basement rooms were still habitable, if the occupant possessed the determination. For a while Wyckoff had
exercised that determination, leaving each day just before dawn and returning after dark, lest he be seen entering or
leaving.
Then the cold had come, and he'd taken to building fires in a makeshift stove fashioned from an old oil drum. It worked
fine until the ruins caught fire, and on that night he escaped with his life only by the sheerest luck.
Now, until he found another such redoubt, he was at
the mercy of the elements or the flophouse operators, and
he couldn't make up his mind which he detested more.
Suddenly these dismal reminiscences fled, replaced
by another, more immediate problem. Lights caught his
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eye, arcing through the night with that curious languid pause peculiar to roving police patrols. With practiced
skill, Wyckoff froze and huddled deeper into the shad-ows. This was a neighborhood of commercial shops
in which, during the day, labored printers, shoe finders, cutlers, hardware wholesalers, electrical and
plumbing jobbers, and the like. Here was no score, unless a man happened to be a burglar. Wyckoff was
not, though to the approaching police patrol that might be a distinc-tion without a difference. He decided he
didn't want to chance it.
The patrol edged closer, having stopped at an alley a little farther down, while a cop inside the car shined
his spotlight on the rows of locked doors. Cops didn't do that very often; these must have found a break-in