"Quantum Leap - Prelude" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

He kept going, walking toward the white statue of the seated man, his fingers white too where he gripped his plastic box.
It began out of nothing, out of the earth, a fault in the land where the ground dropped abruptly, leaving the sheared surface glossy, smooth, black. It kept rising, the gloss interrupted by lines. Letters. Words. Names. Hundreds, thousands of names. Names separated only by the larger numbers that were the years, 1965, 1966, 1967 ... He kept going.
The grass was clipped even and close along the narrow gutter at the base. Out of the corner of his eye, as he passed others come to see, to touch, he could see himself reflected in the polished darkness, a blur without substance, as if only the Wall itself had reality in this place. Someone had stuck a scrap of paper in a seam in the stone. Someone else had left a pair of baby shoes, nestled in the lawn like an Easter egg treasure waiting to be found. There were many, many flowers.
He began reciting log tables to himself, sing-song under his breath, trying to keep the image of the table six places ahead of the numbers he was whispering. It was difficult to concentrate. He kept seeing a smiling face in front of him, but no one here was smiling.
There were children, teenagers, standing back awkwardly while their parentsЧmostly their mothers, but some fathers, tooЧstood silent in front of the monument. The teenagers were too young to remember. They hadn't even been born yet. Some of them were even old enough to be parents themselves, and were bringing a third generation to look and wonder. One man held up a little girl to stretch, to press her fingers against cool stone. Grandchildren, he realized with a familiar shock. Grandchildren are making the pilgrimage now. Farther away some played tag among the trees, their laughter a dissonant music in this place.
He swallowed a surge of irrational anger that he had no children to bring. There had never been a chance for children; the laughter represented one more lost opportunity, one more empty future. He paused between steps to control the sudden rage, knowing anger was easier to feel than sorrow.
A man in late middle age and a wheelchair rolled by, his empty gray tweed pants legs pinned up to keep them from flopping into the spokes. Sam stepped aside to make way for him. The man had neatly trimmed hair and a short beard and wore aviator glasses, hiding his eyes; he had an open whiskey bottle cradled in his lap. He paused by the wall and stretched up, his fingers brushing against the black stone. Settling back with a sigh, he took the bottle by the neck and upended it, pouring perhaps an ounce of whiskey into a brown patch of grass. Sam had seen him there before, always performing the same libation, always in silence. Having made his offering, the man backed the chair around with the ease of years of practice and pushed away, still in silence.

Someone had left a medal case at the base of the wall, propped open to show a bald eagle circled in barbed wire, depending from a ribbon with a wide black band down the center and alternating thin stripes of red, white, and blue on either side. Next to it was someone's combat boot, a hole ripped in the side. Some distance away a bearded, bald man wearing jungle fatigues kissed an envelope and wedged it into the crack separating the panels. He was weeping.
It was his turn, now. He had no rituals to perform here, except to come, and stand, and like all the others to reach out and touch the name carved silver in the black stone. The stone was cold. With the feel of it, he had to remember, and mere numbers could not keep the memories back.
Basketball. That was always the first memory. Team practice and Coach bringing in someone new to play, someone wearing a gorilla mask to show them they shouldn't be intimidated by mere looksЧthe important thing was always the person behind the mask, behind the appearance. And the hug, when the mask came off and he could see who the other man really wasЧhe could still feel the hug. His brother's hug. Brotherly love.
It wasn't all happiness. He could remember too the fights, wrestling across the barn floor practically under the cows' udders, and the time he'd been beaten so badly Tom had been ashamed, had taken him for his first lessons in jujitsu.
Tom had been sorry for that, the next time they wrestled. Sam could still see the expression on his face.
He remembered teaching his older brother to play chess.
He remembered his older brother telling him how to handle himself on his first date, with Judy Engstrom.
He remembered it all, all of it, too damned well. He hated it, he could pick any image, any memory out of the past and see it, see it as clear as if Tom were there, in front of him, warm, alive, smiling.. ..
Instead of the cool black stone, and the name, one of the thousands of names.
Thomas Andrew Beckett.
He touched it, as he always touched it, with his eyes closed, lightly, running his fingertips along the grooves of the letters, as if he couldn't believe them.
They never changed.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, as he always did, every time he came. That, too, never changed.
Then he turned away, walking back through the gardens past the other mourners, hugging the blue box to his chest.

SPRING, 1993

... Dr. Sam Beckett led an elite group of scientists into the desert to develop a top-secret Project known as Quantum Leap....

What I mean by living to one's self is living in the world, as in it, not of it.... It is to be a silent spectator of the mighty scene of things;... to take a thoughtful, anxious interest or curiosity in what is passing in the world, but not to feel the slightest inclination to make or meddle with it.
ЧWilliam Hazlitt On Living to One's Self, 1839

"They're complaining about the noise in Taos again, you know," Al Calavicci announced, setting aside a news magazine. It was the middle of the first shift, and like half the workers on the Project, Sam and Al had stopped for lunch. At Al's suggestion, they'd gone to the cafeteria rather than working through at their desks, just for the change of scenery. "They say it's driving dogs crazy. Are we driving dogs crazy?"
Sam gave the idea careful consideration. "I don't think so," he said cautiously. "I can't think of any reason it should."
The noise in question, a low throbbing sound from the generators and the prototype computer they powered, had made the local news media again, and was a tabloid seven days' wonder. The people working at the Project either learned to ignore it or quit very quickly.
"They've got a team from Los Alamos and Sandia and the military investigating it. I hope they know better than to look in this direction."
"I don't think they will," Sam said, losing interest. "I have contacts inside the Labs. I wouldn't worry about it."
"That's good." Al got up from the metal table and got another cup of coffee from the machine in the alcove. "I'd hate to have to explain ourselves to the media as well as those guys from the investigation crew. They'd want to know why they weren't given this project."
"They couldn't do it," Sam said, without a trace of egotism. "I don't work for them."
Al, who had heard the remark in much the same spirit someone from one of the Labs in question would have, snorted quietly. Scientists, in his opinion, could be as much prima donnas as any artist. He was grateful his own doctorate was in aeronautical engineering, a trade where people could actually get their hands dirty. "O-kay. So what's on our agenda this afternoon?"
"We're finished with Phase II. The cavern's all roughed out. The cultures are still doing fine. It's just this funding thing." A shadow crossed his face, and he stretched out his legs and stared into the middle distance. It was the look Al had dubbed "QuietЧGenius at Work."
"That's just construction money, though. We got the expense and capital equipment budgets we asked for. So what are you waiting for? I hear somebody in Tokyo is working on neuron chips too. You're not going to let him beat you, are you?"
Sam grunted, not listening.
Another cluster of engineers crowded into the little cafeteria, talking about last night's Albuquerque Dukes game. They clattered into the back room, where a refrigerator with glass sliding doors took up one wall, and a bank of microwaves and convection ovens took up another, and began rooting through the stock of fast food, looking for lunch.
Sam continued to stare at nothing, his brows knit.
The engineers came out and took a table next to Sam and Al, greeting Al but glancing at Sam and turning away without wasting their breath.
Al sighed and took another sip of coffee.
The cafeteria was particularly depressing when one's lunch companion was off somewhere in the Twilight Zone. There were only the two rooms, and a couple of restrooms and one extra door off to one side; the construction crew hadn't quite finished painting the plasterboard up by the wall, giving it a distinctly uneven look very similar to the horizon outside. Someone had brought in, heaven only knew how, an upright piano and parked it in a corner, underneath the open air-conditioning duct.
The building was even uglier on the outside. It was plain cinderblock, with a corrugated tin roof and a wooden door frame that needed paint. To the casual observer, it looked like four abandoned buildings out in the middle of nowhere, if nowhere was a high New Mexico plateau. Nowhere with a short stretch of road running past.
The more astute observer might notice deep ruts where heavy trucks had been, might notice that the short stretch of roadЧit was less than a mile longЧwas suspiciously smooth and free of rocks and debris.
The most astute observerЧsay, one who had flown in that morning as pilot to a small jet, landing on that convenient stretch of roadЧmight notice well-trodden paths between the buildings, several vehicles lined up as if in a parking lot behind them, and a remarkable lack of signs of decay for ostensibly abandoned buildings.
This was the surface image of Project Quantum Leap. It was unprepossessing, faintly off-putting, in fact. Al had found that if he waved at a map and explained to congressional aides and other advisers just how remote it was, with casual asides about scorpions and the rattlers coiled under the front steps, congressional investigating committees often found it expedient to take his word for what was going on. This was convenient, at least for the Project Director. Al wasn't sure he wanted to know just how convenient Sam found it.