"Richard Harding - Outrider 02 - Fire And Ice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harding Richard)

into the ceilings were cracked skylights showing a leaden cold sky. Thus
Bonner could generate heat and he got as much of the daylight as he could.
Throughout the new world light came from two main sources: the sun or kerosene
lamps. But kerosene was hard to find so people resorted to smoky pitch
torches. Houses were always burning down, and because there was no running
water their owners could only watch them bum, flames consuming a man's whole
store of food, clothing, ammunition-stuff that was almost imposable to
replace. The very poor-the slaves-went to bed at nightfall. There wasn't much
furniture in Bonner's little flat. A bed, a few chairs-and books. They were
stacked along the floor, jammed into gray metal shelves Bonner had found in a
bombed-out office building in what had once been downtown. He collected books
when he could, anything he could get his hands on. There was a vast blank
spot, a wide dark unexplored sea in human learning, men on earth had no idea
what had passed before them. No one really cared. Except Bonner. Deep within
him he felt the need to reclaim the past, hoping to find the key to his own
time and to the future. It was painful work. References made by the ancient
authors so casually meant nothing to him: Hitler, the Panama Canal, the Pope,
Italy, a gas turbine, Albert Einstein, a nuclear reactor, a silicon chip,
Vietnam.... Gradually, Bonner taught himself the rudiments of the past. Like a
child taking his first clumsy steps, Bonner learned the old, dead facts. Some
he understood completely, others he would never fathom. Hitler had been a
world leader who had plunged the world into war-but it hadn't been he who
destroyed the earth. Bonner knew he was destined to fail, that ultimately he
would be frustrated. There was a piece missing, nothing he read would ever
tell him why the world had been bombed into ruins. The books always stopped
short of explaining that; they never said what dredged up such hate in men
that they wanted to kill an entire world. He learned that there had been
another country called the USSR and that it was the natural enemy of the
United States. These two countries were called superpowers and each was
hell-bent on the destruction of the other. Bonner presumed that they had
started the war that had brought the world into a firestorm of death. But why?
None of the books he read could explain that. He would never know why and it
gnawed at him like a cancer.... Bonner swung up off his bed and pulled on his
heavy black boots. A fire burned in the grate in front of the bed. He tossed
the book he had been reading- Extraordinary Popular Delusions or the Madness
of Crowds-aside. The girl, a young woman who had attached herself to Bonner
like a stray dog to a sympathetic kid, lay on the bed next to him. She watched
his every move with jealousy. "Are you going someplace?" she
asked. "Dorca's." She sighed in relief. Hardly a moment passed that she
didn't worry that Bonner was going to walk out and not return for months. But
he had been sticking close to home a lot recently. He had vanished for a while
during the summer and returned exhausted, sad, and with the look of a man
hunted and haunted by his memories, his hates. "Please be careful." He
smiled gently. "Okay," he said. She was a nice girl, with soft wide blue eyes
and long brown hair that fell down her shoulder?. After they made love she
would breathe passionately in his ear, "I love you...." But Bonner's world,
the life he led, didn't permit love... not anymore. He had loved once, a woman
called Dara, a woman he had killed with his own hands. Mercy, love, devotion
had made him kill her. Many of the writers he read spoke of God. Gradually,
over a thousand pages, Bonner had taught himself who God was. The sense of God