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

Wait a minute. I was three when we left. I was two during the 2066 World Cup. I couldn't remember
that.
├Дt
Better late than never, I guess. It was good to hear him admit it. At the same time, it made me wonder
how much he knew before Susan Constant ever left Earth. Was he afraid of youтАФof EvelynтАФeven
then?

I think he was. He'd stood up to the grueling physical screening, but so had more than a hundred other
pilots. What made my father different was one thing: Evelyn responded to him. He must have wondered
why, and wondered what it would cost him.

Why him, I wonder? How many other people with the same r├йsum├й had she reduced to catatonia? I
know that happened.

You're not even a woman.
├Дt
Two years I spent drifting around Susan Constant after the accident, haunted and frightened and
compelled by the ghostly ruin of my father who emerged from the pilot chamber once a day to visit me
and run the routine diagnostics he'd so disastrously neglected before. That's a lot of time for watching
canned vid history, but I didn't understand anything I saw. Pictures of people who looked angry. Fires.
Every once in a while vid of the Lagrange station with Susan Constant taking shape.

When my dad came out of the womb, I cried. Every time. He held me and said I'm sorry, pal, over and
over until I stopped. I remember asking him why he couldn't stay, and the broken expression on his face
when he couldn't explain it to me. Desperate to hear his voice, I kept talking, asking him questions about
what I'd seen on the vid, and that's how I got his version of what happened. I think if things had gone
differently, he might have been a good father.
├Дt
The kinds of people who controlled the vast majority of the world's wealth were also the kinds of people
who couldn't actually believe that Big Mickey would destroy them; they'd ride out the impact and
afterwards set about remaking the shattered Earth in their own images. Everybody wanted a lifeboat, but
everybody wanted someone else to build it and let them board.

So when a brand-new German corporation called Schimmel GmbH offered the American government
thirty billion dollars for a short-term lease on the entirety of Lagrange's dock space, the cash was
impossible to refuse. The White House fed the money to Lockheed, which revved up its Mars program,
and Schimmel monopolized launch facilities all over Central Asia, lifting material and personnel to their
new base at Lagrange.

They tried to deflect questions about what they were doing, but before too long the pressure got so
intense that they had to respond. At a news conference broadcast worldwide on September 23, 2064, a
Schimmel spokesman dropped a bombshell that for a few weeks made everyone forget Big Mickey.

They had discovered something out there that wasn't really an AI, wasn't really a ship either, wasn't really
anything any of us had words for just yet.
├Дt
Evelyn showed me a recording of the Schimmel press conference when I was about twelve, before I
knew about the Lodge, before Julio Furcal died, when I still had a chance at being a kid. Not a normal
kidтАФtwo years alone on Susan Constant took care of that possibilityтАФbut a kid. I think being a kid
means being able to rely on people to make good decisions for you. If Grant City hadn't turned into a