"Harlan Ellison - Alone Against Tomorrow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

long times. I donтАЩt know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok
always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if
we didnтАЩt know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a
slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies
she wanted us to believe that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought
her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, five men all to herself. No, AM
had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasnтАЩt nice to do.
I was the only one still sane and whole. AM had not tampered with my mind.
I only had to suffer what he visited down on us. All the delusions, all the nightmares, the torments.
But those scum, all four of them, they were lined and arrayed against me. If I hadnтАЩt had to stand them off
all the time, be on my guard against them all the time, I might have found it easier to combat AM.
At which point it passed, and I began crying. Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and
if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized
completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and
torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were
helpless. It also became hideously clear:
If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.




The hurricane hit us with the force of a glacier thundering into the sea. It was a palpable presence.
Winds that tore at us, flinging us back the way we had come, down the twisting, computer-lined corridors
of the darkway. Ellen screamed as she was lifted and hurled face-forward into a screaming shoal of
machines, their individual voices strident as bats in flight. She could not even fall. The howling wind kept
her aloft, buffeted her, bounced her, tossed her back and back and down away from us, out of sight
suddenly as she was swirled around a bend in the darkway. Her face had been bloody, her eyes closed.
None of us could get to her. We clung tenaciously to whatever outcropping we had reached:
Benny wedged in between two great crackle-finish cabinets, Nimdok with fingers claw-formed over a
railing circling a catwalk forty feet above us, Gorrister plastered upside-down against a wall niche formed
by two great machines with glass-faced dials that swung back and forth between red and yellow lines
whose meanings we could not even fathom.
Sliding across the deckplates, the tips of my fingers had been ripped away. I was trembling,
shuddering, rocking as the wind beat at me, whipped at me, screamed down out of nowhere at me and
pulled me free from one sliver-thin opening in the plates to the next. My mind was a roiling tinkling suck-
sounding softness of brain parts that expanded and contracted in quivering frenzy.
The wind was the scream of a great mad bird, as it flapped its immense wings.
And then we were all lifted and hurled away from there, down back the way we had come, around
a bend, into a darkway we had never explored, over terrain that was ruined and filled with broken glass and
rotting cables and rusted metal and far away farther than any of us had ever been...
Trailing along miles behind Ellen, I could see her every now and then, crashing into metal walls
and surging on, with all of us screaming in the freezing, thunderous hurricane wind that would never end
and then suddenly it stopped and we fell. We had been in flight for an endless time. I thought it might have
been weeks. We fell, and hit, and I went through red and gray and black and heard myself moaning. Not
dead.




AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the