"Michael Kandel - Hooking Up" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kandel Michael)

earthquake drill, like the kind they had on Nerol near the equator. Topaz had
seen a video once. She remembered that everyone was supposed to get under the
nearest table. Once a whole town was destroyed by a quake, and the sky was
purple-gray for a month after that even as far as their continent, Anglia.

The children were still, though some arms and legs were twitching a little, the
way dogs do in their sleep when they have dreams. Whatever this was, it didn't
seem to Topaz like a joke. After a while, she got up and went to the classroom,
and there was Ms. C. on the floor by her desk. Ms. C. was twitching too. Topaz
saw her teacher's eyes. They were all white. And there was some white on Ms.
C.'s lips. That frightened Topaz, so she ran out, not stopping to get her
satchel with her new art supplies from her locker.

She took the upper shuttle, which was running fine, except that the people in it
were either lying on the floor or lying on their seats on top of one another.
The only sound besides the humming of the shuttle was a child in the back
crying. Topaz looked and saw that the child was standing and pulling on the hand
of one of the people. He was a toddler, curly-haired, maybe two years old, and
the fact that he wasn't lying down with everyone else frightened Topaz even more
than her teacher's white eyes had, because the thought came to her, and what a
cold thought it was, that she and the toddler were the only two people in the
shuttle car who were not hooked up.

Topaz ran home as fast as she could from the shuttle stop near her house, past
some people lying in the street or on the sidewalk. One man was on his back and
had his mouth open, and his eyes were open too and didn't blink once. Help,
Topaz cried, though there was no one around to help her. On Nerol there would
have been police robots, and they would have come quickly to see what was the
matter.

Mother, Father, she called, running in, but they weren't at home. Topaz went to
phone her mother at work but couldn't find the phone, then she remembered that
they didn't have a phone anymore, not needing one. I hope they're all right, she
said out loud, like a prayer. She didn't know what to do. She didn't want to go
back outside, where all the fallen people were. She got into her bed upstairs
and pulled the covers over her head, but she felt much too nervous to keep lying
there, so she got out of bed and went downstairs again.

She turned on the news on the compuvision. There was no news or any show on,
just a sign that said that there had been a crash and people should wait. The
system would be up momentarily. Topaz sat and stared at the screen and read it
ten times, trying to figure out, from those few words, what had happened and
what it meant. If the system crashed, what did that do to the people who had
plons in their brains? Would they have to go to the hospital? Topaz remembered
what her mother had said, that eighty-five percent of the people on Earth, maybe
ninety percent, were hooked up.

She went from room to room and looked at everything carefully, her mother's
things, her father's things, the furniture, the pictures on the wall. One
picture was of a state fair that Topaz had been to on Nerol when she was seven.