"Rob Grant - Colony" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grant Rob)

guy. Still, he tries. He straightens his stance, in case Dopple is short, and tilts his
head to one side, trying to offer an un-Dopplelike profile. 'Not me.'
Red hands him back his wallet. 'What can I say? You're not our next
appointment. This is uncustomarily unprofessional.'
'Don't mention it.'
'I'd hate you to think we go around throwing people out of windows willy-nilly.'
Willy-nilly? Eddie snorts playfully, trying to suggest the very thought is
preposterous.
Baldy is standing impatiently in the corridor now. Keen to make up for lost time.
Keen to keep the next 'appointment'. Red looks over, nods, and crosses towards
him. Eddie realizes that, for some reason, he's waiting until the men have gone to
breathe properly.
'Like I said: it's a busy night.' Red pauses in Eddie's shattered doorway. 'And if I
were you, pilgrim, I'd renew that sex clearance card.'
Eddie smiles and nods. 'I'll do that.'
Red winks. 'You never know when you might get lucky.'

2
It's a strange night in a strange town. A town with just one night to live.
In the record books, it's Afortunado City. To the people who use it, it's simply
Lucky Town.
Its one, long street is a chaos of humanity. Thousands of people who will have no
need of money tomorrow, eager to spend what they've got, and the rest of the
population just as eager to relieve them of it. There are just a few short hours for the
dealers to deal, the grifters to grift and the hookers to hook. Prices are inflating by
the second.
Stepping out of the hotel on the very perimeter of town, Charles Perry Gordon
experiences a bolt of heat in his stomach. The closest he's ever come to a sense of
completeness. Fulfilment. He imagined this town. It sprang out of his mind's eye.
He conjured it up, reclining in his big leather chair, at his desk in his office in Rio.
And here it is.
He had nothing to do with the architecture, or the technical nuts and bolts side of
constructing Afortunado. He merely predicted it. It was a place that, to Gordon's
mind, simply had to exist. The Project is the biggest operation ever undertaken by
the human race, with a budget to match. It employs tens of thousands of people and
pays them extravagantly well. Naturally, they need somewhere to dispose of their
income and blow off steam. And Afortunado was born to give them somewhere to
do just that. A pleasure city, carved out of the unforgiving desert of snow. An
'O-ice-is' it's been called. And though Gordon's seen it many times in his head, this
is his first brush with the wonderful reality of it.
Standing at the top of the steps, he looks right into the human tumult thronging the
main street like a vast, slow-motion particle explosion. He listens to the complex yet
primitive music of human voices clamouring for attention.
To his left, he squints at the shimmering heat haze of the hotwall, the thermal
barrier that separates the town from the lethal wilderness of the Antarctic peaks that
surround it. Across the street, a group of youths in Bermuda shorts, fledgling
goatees and brightly coloured shirts are tossing empty beer cans through the barrier,
just to watch them flare and vanish. Curious to see them, in their casual summery
gang uniforms, just metres away from a hostile desert of snow. Without the hotwall,
their life expectancy would be measured in minutes.