"Alex Irvine - Volunteers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Irvine Alexander C)

"Before I tell you this, you need to understand something," Dad said. "A lot of people around here think
I'm crazy. They're right, but I'm not crazy the way they think I am. I'm crazy because only a crazy man
would have done what I did. Now I'm going to tell you about Evelyn, but you have to swear that you
won't repeat any of this. Not to anyone."

He knows, I thought. We're talking in code, like spies in Berlin or Cairo. "I swear. Cross my heart and
hope to die."

He looked pained at the expression. "For God's sake, Wiley, people stopped talking like that before I
was born."

This shamed me, and I looked down at the ground. "What am I supposed to say?"

A frustrated sigh escaped the old man. "I'm sorry, kid. None of this is your fault. I hear you talking like
Beaver Cleaver and I want to fucking strangle Milt Bahrani." He looked at his hands. "Not that I'm strong
enough to strangle anybody."

Through the spex, I could see the gyros in my dad's hips and the coil around his spine. I could measure
the volume of his indrawn breath and track the dispersion of what he called the Telomerase Monkeys
from his bone marrow. But I could not see why James Brennan had done what he had done on Susan
Constant.

My father put a hand on the back of my neck. "You're surrounded by lunatics, son of mine. A bunch of
terrified people who know they're going crazy, so they've built themselves a little fantasy village out of the
blandest and safest material they could find, which was TV's version of the Fifties. Nothing I can do
about it but tell you how we got this way. You're not going to want to repeat this to anyone at school.
People don't like to think about it. They don't like to think about me, and that's part of the reason why
they're giving you such a hard time." He sighed. "Where to begin. While your mother was pregnant with
you, I got a call from a German company called Schimmel wanting to know if they could hire me for a
trip to the asteroid belt. I said no, that I was dirt-bound until my kid was born and signed up to do the
weekly milk run to Lagrange Five for almost a year after your due date. They wouldn't tell me why they
wanted me to go out there, but I found out later. After we started hearing about Big Mickey, which was
when you were about a year old, Schimmel called me again. This time they didn't want me to go to the
asteroids; they wanted me to go to Hamburg and wouldn't tell me why, but they offered me a lot of
money to consult on a project. I said okay, and went.

"The Schimmel headquarters was something. It spread out over a huge piece of land along the Elbe
River, and Mehmet Scholl, the guy who picked me up at the airport, gave me the tour before taking me
in. He said he was a xenobiologist. 'Am I supposed to consult about Martian bacteria?' I asked. I'd been
to Mars twice but wasn't any kind of expert on anything except going there and getting back.

"Mehmet laughed. 'No, we're way up the food chain from those,' he said. We went into his office and
met a woman named Birgid Prinz, who was some kind of psychiatrist. That's when I started getting a little
spooky about the whole situation. Then another guy came in, one of these oily guys with a title like
Stakeholder Relations Manager, and we got started. The flack's name was Rudi, and he didn't waste any
time. The first thing he said to me was, 'Mr. Brennan, we need you to save a portion of humanity.'"

My dad saw me looking at him and laughed. "I can see what you're thinking, Wiley. You're right. I was
the wrong guy. But the problem was, Evelyn didn't care."