"Continuing Time - 01 - Emerald Eyes" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

untraceable, SpaceFarer issue hard CU; the clerk blinked in curiosity at the
sight of the rare silver coins, but took the CU:1.25 without word.
He stood quietly for several minutes, waiting for the Bullet to arrive. At 4:12
the Bullet came up out of the ground, and coasted down the superconductor maglev
monorail to a slow gliding stop, a single structure made of nearly a hundred
meters of supertwisted sheet monocrystal. The Bullet could not be painted and
did not need to be washed, filth simply slid off. It could not be scratched or
dented.
Under sufficient impact, it would shatter
At 4:15 precisely the Bullet pulled out of the Massapequa Park station and was
fed slowly back into the interlock. In the lock the atmosphere was evacuated,
and the Bullet was injected back into the Tube with a steady acceleration that
was so smooth it was almost imperceptible.
Once, almost ten years ago, ideologs who were never identifiedЧJohnny Rebs,
perhaps, or else the Erisian ClawЧleft a bowling ball in the Tube. The Bullet
struck it at full cruising speed. There was an average clearance of five
centimeters around the circumference of the Bullet, when it struck the bowling
ball the Bullet turned the bowling ball into vaporized dust
In the process, the Bullet itself touched the side of the Tube. The resultant
earthquake destroyed eighteen kilometers of the Tube, the shock wave was felt
nearly sixty kilometers from the place where the Bullet shattered itself against
a bowling ball.
Carl sat in the seat nearest the exit, not because it would be of any help in
the event of trouble with the Bullet, but because it would save him time when
the train stopped. He stowed his briefcase in the rack under the seat and
purchased a large cup of coffee from the waitbot as it rolled down the long
center aisle. Service that morning was good, before the crush hours started it
usually was.
The first thing he saw when he turned on the news viewer made him wince. HeТd
gone to greater than usual trouble that morning to ensure that his activities
remained unnoticed, logging on to the InfoNet, heТd picked the default user
profile rather than identify himself by his thumbprint, thus downloading his
news habits from his InfoNet profile. Had he been using his own user profile the
screen that greeted him would not have surprised him much, his private profile
had been taught to start out with the news items of greatest interest to him,
and work its way down the list.
He was logged on, however, anonymously, and despite that, his face was all over
the front screen of the morning edition of the Electronic Times newsboard. The
headline the video tablet showedЧCarl did not have his earphone turned onЧwas
УUNIFICATION COUNCIL PASSES GENIE BILL.Ф
The texts of the several stories were lacking. Bare bones of the AmendmentЧit
was not, as the front-screen headline implied, a bill, but the Eighth Amendment
to the Statement of PrinciplesЧand a brief sketch of its ramifications for both
the telepaths and the feline de Nostri with another sketch of the principals
involved in the bill on both sides. Predictably, MalkoТs involvement with the
Eighth Amendment, and the limited but real opposition the Amendment had received
from Secretary General AmnierТs office was the primary subject for most of the
newsdancers. It was a romantic lead, two war heroes on opposite sides during the
war, and still so four and a half decades later.
Auditing the stories, Carl found he could reliably judge any particular