"Monica Hughes - Devil On My Back" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Monica)

2
The Revolt
At unexpected moments during the next week the memory of Dreamland returned to Tomi; the bitter
smell of wet leaves, the sweet smoky taste of freshly cooked fish. How real were the products of
Dreamland? Was it all made up like a story in an old-style book? Or was the wilderness outside ArcOne
really like that?
One free period he did something that had never crossed his mind before: he went exploring.
Impulsively he stepped into one of the central elevators and looked at the display panel. Where should he
go? There were only six buttons: G. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. He had spent his life on Three, where the inhabitants of
the City lived and slept, ate and studied. Below him lay the floor where all the raw materials salvaged at
the beginning of the Age of Confusion had been stored. Below that, at Level Five, were the intricacies of
the water treatment plant, the recyclers, and the generator, through which the river that ran Outside was
diverted to turn the turbines and make the City's electricity. The solar heat storage tanks were down
there too. Boring stuff, only fit for workers and slaves.
He looked at the other buttons. On the second floor were all the factories, manned by an army of
workers, people only capable of carrying one or two workpaks. Above, on the first floor, were the yeast
vats, the soya synthesizers and all the other aspects of food production, both real and artificial, for the
twelve thousand persons, Lords, soldiers, workers and slaves, who made up the population of ArcOne.
Ground. He had never been to the top of the City before. Feeling very daring Tomi touched the
button marked G. The TV monitor in the ceiling of the elevator swung to check his identity. Then the
door slid shut and the elevator moved silently upward.
When the door sighed open Tomi stepped out into the smell of the Dreamland forest. Wild. Wet.
Green. He took a deep breath and looked around. Five hundred meters away the Dome met the ground
in a concrete buttress that was the outer wall of the buried city. He leaned back and tried to look up, but
his paks tugged painfully at the nape of his neck and he quickly slumped back into his lordly stoop. But
he had seen that the sky above the transparent Dome was not the miraculous blue of Dreamland but a
dirty grey. So much for dreams!
He strolled along the path that led from the central elevator block in a southeast direction. His
sandals crunched pleasantly against damp pebbles. On either side grew green vines with globular fruit,
green, yellow and red. Why, they were tomatoes! How extraordinary to see a tomato growing. Beyond
the tomatoes were rows of other vines with coarse furry pods. He called to a worker busy plucking the
ripe pods.
"What are those things?"
"Soy beans, Young Lord. They are used for..."
"Yes, yes. I know what they are used for, better than you, I should think. I have never seen them
growing before, that is all. What lies beyond there," He pointed to the curve of concrete wall, now about
two hundred meters away.
The worker stared. "Why... Outside, Young Lord."
"I know that, stupid. Is it possible to see what it looks like?"
"Oh, yes. May I show the Young Lord?" The worker scurried along the pebbled path to the wall,
which stood about waist high and was so deep that when Tomi reached across it he could not touch the
plastic skin that was the Dome.
He stared out. He was looking down a long valley, whose steep slopes were thickly wooded
with dark trees. Beyond were more hills, more valleys, vanishing into a greyness of distance. It was very
still, very empty, very enormous.
"Some Lords are not able to look out even though they know the Dome is there," the worker
said suddenly.
"I am not afraid," Tomi lied.
"I can see that, Young Lord."