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

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He told me the rest of it as the moon came up over the hills west of Grant City, beyond the farm and the
cemetery and the shuttle pad. "I wasn't famous, exactly, but not everyone on Earth had been to Mars
twice, and there was still a little glitter on anyone who made his living in space. Evelyn apparently took a
liking to me. I'm not sure how else to put it. Prinz and Scholl had her look at lots of vid, newsnets and
whatever else, to try and ground her in the here-and-now of Earth in the 2060s, and she seized on me.
Birgid Prinz told me it was a network feed of me coming out of a shuttle after the Burroughs
expedition."

"You telling me she got a crush on you, Dad?" I asked. In that moment I felt like I'd already heard
enough.

"Not exactly," he said. "Well, sort of. She was like a little kid, all the Navigators were. They had these
intense desires and no real ability to get perspective on why they wanted things. She saw me and she
liked me, and after that she wouldn't let anybody else get close."

Another trip around the bench, and this time Dad grunted when he sat down. "You want to walk?" I
asked him.

He shook his head. "Wouldn't help. I'm two hundred and thirty years old, Wiley. The T-Monkeys can't
work forever." His head drooped. "Sorry. Not good parenting to talk about your mortality in front of
your kid."

I was about to say that it was time he stopped trying to hide things from me, his mortality included.
Instead I scooted closer to him on the bench and put an arm around his shoulders. I was barely fifteen,
but already bigger than him. "Don't worry about it, Dad," I said.

He breathed slowly in and out a couple of times and then went on. "Truth of the situation is that I was an
idiot. I resented Evelyn choosing me, so my first response was to say, Tough. Let her fixate on someone
else. Even though there were two thousand lives depending on her, and I guess on me. Birgid and Rudi
gave me a little time to get over myself and then pointed out that they had ships to build and might be able
to save some lives if I would get my head out of my ass long enough to talk to Evelyn and see if she liked
me in person. So I did, and she did. She liked me a lot. She kind of probed at me all the time, swore she
couldn't read minds but always seemed to know what I was feeling. That got to be nice, since your mom
and I weren't getting along all that well. The first year after a kid is tough."

I pulled away again. "Just say it," I said. "Just admit that Evelyn got jealous and killed Mom."

My father went very still. He lifted his head with painful slowness and turned to look me in the eye.
"Nothing is ever that simple, Wiley," he said. "I killed your mother. I didn't mean to, but I did. Evelyn
didn't do it. I was scared and lonely and she made me feel peaceful and safe and happy, and while I was
feeling peaceful and safe and happy I forgot to run maintenance checks and the life-support computer
went out. That's what happened."

He believed it. He needed me to believe it. I wanted to, but I wasn't sure if I could.
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Other than the bowling alley, the place to hang out was the Nickelodeon. That went up the year after
Bel-Mark, and pretty soon if you were looking for someone in Grant City and you knew they weren't at
work, you could find them at one of those two places. There were movies every night, and after a while
the time between seven and nine at night became an unofficial 1956 rally and revival around the altar of