"Garbage Day" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

The second robot seemed to be waiting for Bascal, seemed somehow to be expecting
to follow him through. But instead it fell twitching to the floor, when Bascal
produced a tiny, toyish-looking gun of blue plastic, and calmly made the robot's
mirror-bright head disappear. There was no mess, and barely any sound. A
teleport gun?
"Close the gate to incoming calls," Bascal said to the fax, then turned to his
troops with a self-satisfied grin. "These parents of ours, they have nothing to
pass on or share. Nothing to teach us except sit down, shut up, and live in
their shadows forever. It's their Queendom, right? Always will be."
Grumbles of assent from the boys. They had immortal parents, too. They'd maybe
given this issue some thought; Conrad certainly had. And anyway you just had to
admire the prince's cool. Like it was all a game, like he could walk anywhere,
through fire and bullets and untamed black holes, without so much as a flinch.
You wanted to stand behind him, you really did.
"Well," Bascal continued, "What say we tear the place up a little? A night on
Earth, my treat. You break it, I buy it."
Conrad had always had a problem with impulse Ч it was pretty much why he'd been
exiled here in the first place. So while he knew there'd be hell to pay
eventually, he really did like the idea of busting things up. What
fourteen-year-old didn't?
"Jesus Christ, Bascal," he said with conviction, "I'd follow you anywhere."



2. Domes of the Popcorn Moon



They bounced through a repeater just inside the orbit of Pluto, and were
funneled into a ring collapsiter segment where their signal could travel, for a
while, much faster than the classical speed of light. Planets and planettes and
planetoids whizzed by, unseen. There was no sensation associated with this; the
boys' bodies and minds Ч perhaps their souls Ч were reduced to quantum wave
packets for the journey. This was the NESCOG, the New Systemwide Collapsiter
Grid, brainchild of Bascal's father. To an outside observer, the journey from
Camp Friendly in the middle Kuiper belt, to Earth in the Inner System, could
appear to take anywhere from eight to ten hours, depending on network congestion
and the alignment of the various nodes and conduits. To the boys themselves, the
journey felt Ч and for practical purposes was Ч instantaneous, no more
significant or amazing than stepping through a curtain.
They could have specified a number of copies, and spilled out the other end en
masse, an army of themselves. They could have specified a color, and come out
painted bright blue. They could have specified an orientation, and come out
facing backwards. But they did none of these things, and stepped out as
themselves. Nothing else had occurred to them on the spur of the moment, and
anyway antics like that would trip the filters and provoke inquiry.
On the curtain's other side was Athens, where it was noon, and brutally hot.
Another single step whisked them around to Calcutta, which was also hot, and
drenched in monsoon rains. They ended up in Denver, where the Sun had recently
set on a summer-warm city, and the air was just fine. They spilled out into