"Keith Laumer & Eric Flint - Future Imperfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

twisting his head to look over his shoulder; dim light from below cast a ruddy highlight
on his cheek. Then he saw me. His mouth opened and I jumped, caught the edge of the
two-by-six, heaved it up. He went over without a sound, caught himself with one hand,
held on, dangling, his feet working like a bicycle rider. I jerked the board hard, and he
went down. It seemed like a long time before he hit.
***
Ten minutes later, not rested and not fed, operating on pure adrenaline, I was headed
east along a dirt road with the autodrive on ninety.
 Chapter Three

An hour after full dark I pulled into a one-pump motel-cum-caf├й where a long-legged
fellow with thin blondish hair and a mouth like a torn pocket met me at the door with a
shotgun. He fueled me up, sold me coffee and a moon pie with a texture like vinyl tile,
and accepted a well-worn twenty as payment. I felt him smiling craftily at his business
acumen; the habits of a lifetime of penny-pinching are hard to break.
The beach came into view an hour laterтАФa dark mirrorgleam reflecting the dirty
clouds boiling along above. Trees and rooftops showed above the surface for a mile or
two out; it had been gently sloping farmland before the ocean reclaimed it. The pavement
slid off under the water without a ripple; I boosted my revs, rode my air cushion out onto
it. It was not recommended practiceтАФif you lost power you sank, but I was in no mood to
go boat hunting. I poured on the coal and headed south.
It was a nice three-hour run on still water under a moon the color and shape of a
rotten grapefruit. Once a patrol boat hailed me, but I doused my lights and outran him.
Once I passed over a town that had installed one of the new floodproof all-automatic
power systems. The lights gleamed up at me through green water like something from a
fairy tale.
Just before dawn I hit a stretch of treetops clogged with floating wildlife. I threaded a
twisting path through them, reached dry land as the sun came up reddish-black and flat on
the bottom.
Tampa was a reeking ruin, a seaport town miles from the sea, surrounded by a bog of
gray mud, left high and dry by the freakish withdrawal of the Gulf. Nothing there for me.
Early afternoon brought me into Miami. The beach was wiped cleanтАФa bare sandbar,
but the city proper still gleamed white beside a shore stained black by pumice and scum
oil, and heaped with the jetsam of a drowned continent. Conditions were better here.
There had been no major quakes to judge from the still-standing towers of coral and
chartreuse and turquoise; maybe their hurricane-proof construction had helped when the
ground shook under them. There was even a semblance of normal commerce. Police were
much in evidence, along with squads of nervous-looking Guard recruits weighted down
with combat gear. Lights were on in shops and restaurants, and the polyarcs along
Biscayne were shedding their baleful light on an orderly traffic of cars, trucks and buses.
There were fewer people on the streets than in normal times, but that suited me.
 I checked into the GulfstreamтАФa lavish hundred and fifty-story hostelry that had
known my custom in happier times. The desk man was a former Las Vegas man named
Sal Anzio; he gave a two-handed shake and the twitch of the left cheek that passed with
him for smile.
"Mal Irish," he stated in the tone of one answering questions under duress. "What
brings you into town?"
"Things went a little sour down south," I told him. "The Mexicans have a tendency to
get overexcited when things go wrong, and blame it all on the gringos. Anything doing
here?"