"07 - Conrad's Time Machine (b)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

I packed up, kick started her with one hand and rode off. I never put a foot on
the kick starter, my theory being that if hand cranking wouldn't do it, she
needed a tune up. Electric starters, of course, are for wimps.
I stopped a hundred yards outside the Westover Field gate and peeled the SAC
sticker from the Wixom Ranger faring on my BMW R-60. I no longer felt any hate.
I just didn't want it there, defacing my bike, now that I was free.
I had joined the Air Force for many reasons. Without the money to finish my
degree, I needed a trade, and they'd promised to teach me electronics, the one
promise they'd actually kept. Mostly, though, I'd wanted have some adventures
while I was still young, to spread my wings a little, and see a bit of the
world.
Instead, they'd stuffed me under a mountain for the duration.
More than anything else, I'd wanted to do something . . . significant. To do
something important for my country, and maybe even for the world.
But there's nothing glorious about fixing machinery, especially when the stuff
almost never broke down. Ninety percent of my actual work time had been spent
cleaning floors, dusting equipment, and trying to look busy. Most of the rest of
it was spent filling out paperwork, an occupation that took six times longer
that the actual repair work did.
Mostly, I just sat there at a grey metal desk. The lighting was cool, efficient
fluorescent. The temperature was kept at a constant 70.4 degrees fahrenheit. The
relative humidity was at 48.6 percent The floors and ceilings were white. The
walls were beige. The equipment was a uniform dove grey, with small, unblinking
colored lights.
The silence was deafening.
You sat there for eight hours every day, forbidden to read anything but
technical manuals, staring at the walls and waiting for someone up in the cab to
tell the heavy bombers and all the land-based missiles to go and blow up the
world.
Off duty, you drank a lot, but it didn't help all that much.
My outfit had a suicide rate that was higher than the casualty rate of most
combat outfits in time of war. And it wasn't just the young kids who "took the
pipe." Old, balding sergeants would somehow get sort of listless, and then you'd
hear, unofficially, that they'd put a bullet behind their ear. You never heard a
word officially, of course, not even a notification of the funeral service. It
didn't fit the public image the Air Force wanted everybody to believe in.
Soon, you learned to hate the bastards.
The hate I'd felt for years for the organization that had kept me in useless
bondage had become a bigger part of my life than I had imagined, and now that
those bonds were finally parted, I was left with a vast hollowness inside of me.
I'd sold off almost everything I owned except my camping gear. Even my uniforms
were gone, which wasn't precisely legal since I was still supposed to be a
member of the inactive reserves. But I didn't have any family or anyplace to
send that junk for storage, so if I couldn't fit it into my saddlebags, I
couldn't see keeping it.
I really didn't knowwhat I wanted, but I had a strong handle on some negatives.
Like I never wanted to see another officer again in my life. Mostly, I needed to
get way far away from petty rules and silly regulations and people who outranked
me, which in the Air Force was just about everybody.
I wasn't the kind who got promoted.