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

He told his story often. With each telling it was embellished, and details were added that had not been
apparent before. It was the story of the little bank in. Singapore whose wild speculations in overvalued real
estate had created a Frankenstein's monster of tiered credit in Eurodollars and brought about the collapse of
the entire worldwide banking system. "Deflation," Grand-father had called it, as though he understood what
that meant.
And maybe he had; Wyckoff didn't know. But he did know that there was one thing all the old-timers
agreed upon: the Great Depression of 2028 made all prior eco-nomic upheavals pale by comparison. More
than a quarter-century later it still exerted its effects.
Because young Stanislaus had grown up during those
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Joseph H, Delaney
years and had known nothing else, his approach to his lifestyle had been a great deal more philosophical
than that of his elders. What they lamented he endured without a murmur, because he knew no better. As a
child, he had not been aware he was poor, because everyone around him had been poor, and he was the
same as they.
Only when he had grown a little did he learn that there dwelt on Earth people who did not sleep a dozen to
a rodm or eat porridge with their fingers from a common pot, who wore shoes in summer when they were
not needed. Wisdom arrived about the time his first whiskers appeared, when a sanctimonious social
worker appeared at their flat accompanied by a re-cruiter from the Conservation Corps. The Corps, they
said, was just the thing to make a man of him.
The Corps, Wyckoff musedтАФit still existed. He and his contemporaries called it the "Corpse." It was the
principal reason he avoided the Mission hostels like the plague. Too many people he had known had
checked into theseтАФand into the arms of a press gang.
Wyckoff crept out of the doorway just as another car was passing the police cruiser, and while the spotlight
was trained on another doorway farther up the block. He hoped the cops inside would be distracted enough
so that they wouldn't notice him.
It was a hope soon dashed, and he knew as soon as he ducked around the corner that they would be after
him. Reason told him not to run; he'd done nothing and he had nothing to hide. Impulse argued differently.
At the very least it meant detention here on the street, a search, perhaps a beating, while they tried to learn
his true identity. As a fugitive from the Corps, Wyckoff didn't carry an I.D. That would have made it too
easy for the police to check his background if they ever stopped him. This way was safer.
He took off down the alley, sprinting over the hard-packed snow, which in places had already started to
glaciate into cloudy iceтАФthe kind that would still coat
lords temporal 7
patches of the alley in June. He reached the end of the alley and took a turn to the right, so that he could come up
behind the squadron. In this neighborhood the po-lice always kept one man in the car, and though the man in the car
might move it, he would not be likely to join his companion in a foot search.
Wyckoff reached the right-angle street and raced across a bare sidewalk to the other side. Behind him, he could hear
curses echoing through the stillness of the night, and he knew the pursuing cop had fallen on the ice. That assured his
getaway, since he could now easily put two or three blocks between them.
Even when he knew it was no longer necessary, Wyckoff continued at a slow trot. The exertion was warming his body,
and he was reluctant to let that feeling go. He'd have to be careful not to sweat, though, since that would aggravate his
problems with the cold. He ran on through the silence.
The run ended at the next intersection, where two arterial streets met in chilled, forsaken emptiness. One side of the
intersection was blind. There a huge truck had apparently broken down, and now sat with five feet of its length
protruding into the crosswalk. In the morn-ing, when traffic swelled to its daytime proportions, it would have caused a
snarl which would have had every cop on the force here. But in the dark, nighttime emptiness it was safe, serene, and
unnoticedтАФuntil now.
Notice arrived late to the driver of the low-slung Mallory Electric who whipped around the corner just as Wyckoff was
stepping off the curb. The idiot! He didn't have lights on, and electrics made almost no noise. The car missed Wyckoff