"Barbara Hambly - Windrose 1 - The Silent Tower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hambly Barbara)

It occurred to her that she had a throbbing headache. It must be after ten, she
thoughtтАФthere had still been people around when she'd started working on the
program for analyzing the Tiger missile test results for next week's Navy review.
There was no telling how much longer she'd...
Her eyes sought the green luminosity of the clock.


2:00 A.M.
Two! She could have sworn it wasn't later than tenтАФwell, eleven, since the
janitors had gone home.
No wonder I have a headache, she thought, and ran her hands through the
feathery tangle of her hair. She recalled vaguely that she'd been too busy to eat
dinner; in any case, she'd long ago given up buying the overpriced slumgullion doled
out by the junk machines in the breakroom to those who worked on after regular
hours. That was the tricky thing about the whole San Serano Aerospace Complex she
had learned. The cool, even, white lights never varied; the unscented air never altered
its temperature; and as a result no one ever had a very clear idea of what time it was.


But two in the morning . . .
Without warning, a wave of despair crept over her, filling the farthest corners of
her tired soul like cold and greasy dishwater. The uselessness of it all suddenly
overpowered herтАФnot only getting the program to run, or the tedious documentation
that would have to follow, or the fact that the data was going to have to be altered
tomorrow in any case. Her whole life seemed suddenly to open before her in a vista of
uselessness, an empty freeway leading nowhere.
It was strange to her, for she had, since she left her mother's house, been pretty
content with her solitary life. Maybe that was one of the things wrong with her, she
reflected. She knew herself to be far less good with people than she was with
machinesтАФno matter what you looked like, a computer would never laugh at you
behind your back. Computers never expected you to be capable of things you had not
been taught to do, or cared one way or the other what you did in your spare time.
She was familiar with the vague sense of an obligation to be other than she
wasтАФto be more like her bright and sociable co-workersтАФbut she had never
experienced this hollow, gray feeling of the futility of either staying as she was or
changing to what she ought to be.
The image of Gary Fairchild returned to her mindтАФhandsome, smiling, and
enamored. Her loneliness seemed suddenly overwhelming, her vacillations over his
constant request for her to move in with him suddenly petty and futile. Why not? she
thought. If this is all there is ever going to be . . . Maybe everybody's right about
living with someone, and I'm wrong . . .
Yet the thought of giving up what she had filled her with the dread of some
inevitable doom.
Within her, a small voice struggled to insist, In any case there isn't anything
you can do about it at two in the morning. Tomorrow I'll see him ....
As swiftly as it had come, the dull sense of hopeless grief ebbed away. Joanna
blinked, rubbed her eyes, and wondered with the calm detachment that had gotten her
into trouble in the past, What the hell was that all about?
The thought that she had, for one second, seriously been planning to accede to
Gary's next demand that she live with him made her shudder. She might, she knew, be