"Bruce McAllister - Moving On" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcallister Bruce)

Bruce McAllister - Moving On

When John Klinger went out to the Mojave Witness, which he did as often as
he could, he took the Bell 420. Flying it with his one good arm had gotten
easier over the past few months, and he could forget he didn't have two
good ones. That was one reason he took it: He could forget the pink
plastic.
He would set the little helicopter down thirty meters from the shack at
the eastern end of the Witness and close his eyes, waiting for the rotor
wash to die down. If it was daytime, he would get out and check the three
kilometers of electrified chain-link fence for any animals that had
blundered into it in the night and bury them some distance away, thinking
about death. He would stand for a moment in the shack's doorway looking
out at the endless sand the smog still hadn't touched and wonder how much
time he had. He would think about his parents, the quake-loosened bricks
outside his apartment that had hit him, destroying the nerves in his arm,
and what his twenty-six years of life really added up to.
If it was night, he would sit for a moment in the Bell and watch the moths
Ч like little ghosts Ч batter themselves against the single bulb by the
shack's front door. If there was a moon, he would remember what the
Witness itself Ч the kilometer-long, open tank of water Ч looked like with
the moonlight on its surface and wish he had hovered over it longer. He
would find himself wondering how many weeks or months he had before
Central got the funds for a new detector-translator system and his life
would have to change: With new equipment he wouldn't be able to justify so
many visits, wouldn't be able to come out like this every few days, lying
about "recurrent problems."
Then he would go inside, sit down at the little card table in the shack
and do what no fixer Ч no one in his position Ч was supposed to do: He
would read the transcripts of what the Witness Ч listening day and night
for the voices of the just-dead Ч had picked up from the Limbo.

Whether it was simply against policy, or a misdemeanor, or a felony to
read the transcripts, he could not remember, but he had been doing it now
for months. It was simply a function of the amount of time he spent at
this station, when other fixers were always on the move. Since he spent as
much time here as he could Ч attending to the problems of a
first-generation system and fabricating problems when he needed to Ч his
"crime" had evolved logically enough, hadn't it? He wanted to be out here
away from the city, and so he was Ч two or three times a week. He'd had a
radio for a while, and a video player small enough to fit on the card
table beside the coffee maker, and later a few books, but these, he'd
discovered, had been "baggage" from the city, and really had no place
here. The transcripts belonged when so many other things did not, and one
day he had begun to read them. He was the living, after all, and they were
the dead, and here at least Ч at the Mojave Witness Ч that was all there
was.
Had he been like all the other fixers, the techs who kept the Witnesses
all over southern California working, Davis, his supervisor, would have
moved him from one station to another throughout the Seventh District, all