"Gardner Dozois - A Special Kind of Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

people: some died of suffocation because of a five-minute discrepancy
between an inhaled breath and oxygen received by the lungs, some
drowned in their own blood.

It took about ten minutes, at least as far as we were concerned as
unaffected observers. I had a psychophysicist tell me once that "it" had
both continued to "happen" forever and had never "happened" at all, and
that neither statement canceled out the validity of the other, that each
statement in fact was both "applicable" and "nonapplicable" to the same
situation consecutivelyтАФand I did not understand. It took ten minutes.

At the end of that time, the world got very still.

We looked up. The land had stopped churning. A tiny star appeared
amongst the rubble in the middle distance, small as a pinhead but
incredibly bright and clear. It seemed to suck the night into it like a
vortex, as if it were a pinprick through the worldstuff into a more intense
reality, as if it were gathering a great breath for a shout.

We buried our heads in our arms as one, instinctively.

There was a very bright light, a light that we could feel through the tops
of our heads, a light that left dazzling afterimages even through closed and
shrouded lids. The mountain leaped under us, bounced us into the air
again and again, battered us into near unconsciousness. We never even
heard the roar.

After a while, things got quiet again, except for a continuous low
rumbling. When we looked up, there were thick, sluggish tongues of
molten magma oozing up in vast flows across the veldt, punctuated here
and there by spectacular shower-fountains of vomited sparks.

Our scattershield had taken the brunt of the blast, borne it just long
enough to save our lives, and then overloaded and burnt itself to scrap;
one of the first times that's ever happened.

Nobody said anything. We didn't look at each other. We just lay there.

The chrono said an hour went by, but nobody was aware of it.

Finally, a couple of us got up, in silence, and started to stumble
aimlessly back and forth. One by one, the rest crawled to their feet. Still in
silence, still trying not to look at each other, we automatically cleaned
ourselves up. You hear someone say "it made me shit my pants," and you
think it's an expression; not under the right stimuli. Automatically, we
treated our bruises and lacerations, automatically we tidied the camp up,
buried the ruined scatterfield generator. Automatically, we sat down again
and stared numbly at the light show on the savannah.

Each of us knew the war was overтАФwe knew it with the gut rather than