"Larry Niven - Dry Run" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Dry Run

By habit Simpson was a one-hand driver. On this day he drove with both hands wrapped tight around the wheel strangling it. He looked straight ahead, down the curving length of the freeway, and he stayed in the right-center lane.
He wanted a cigarette; yet he was almost afraid to let go of the wheel. The air-conditioning nozzle blew icy air up at his face and down at his belt buckle; icy because of the way he was perspiring. He felt the weakness in his bowels, and he cursed silently, trying to relax.
The dog in the trunk--
Too late now, too late to change his mind--
He stabbed a finger at the cigarette lighter, missed-- Jesus! He'd only been driving the Buick for five years!--found it and pushed it in. He fumbled a Camel from the central glove compartment, one-handed, without looking. Traffic was not too heavy. It was past seven o'clock, though the July sun was still a falling glory below red streamers of cloud. A few cars had their lights on, unnecessarily. Were the drivers afraid they'd forget later? The cars in this lane were doing sixty to sixty-five. Usually Simpson chose the fast lane. This time was different. No risks on this trip.
Too late now, too late to back out. He wouldn't if he could. He lit the cigarette, dragged, put the lighter back, and gripped the wheel again with both hands. The cigarette bent and flattened between his fingers.
Red taillights. This lane was slowing. He touched the brake with his foot, eased down, harder. Hard! He tried to push the brake through the floor. He stopped a foot behind a vintage Cadillac, and stalled. Simpson swore and turned the ignition hard over. The motor caught instantly.
It didn't matter. Nobody was moving.
Overhead were the swooping concrete noodles of the Santa Monica Freeway ramps. A carpet of cars was stalled underneath, stalled for as far ahead as Simpson could see. Then there was motion in the distance. He waited.
The vintage Cadillac jerked half a car length forward. Simpson followed. Another ripple of motion, another car length forward.
The freeway shouldn't be this crowded. Seven-thirty on a week night? He'd picked his time carefully enough. What was happening?
The Cad moved again. Its driver looked back over his shoulder: angry, middle-aged, sweaty, and somewhat overweight. He looked like he'd bite anyone who came close enough.
Simpson felt the same way. He eased forward.
Murray Simpson was six inches too tall for the driver's seat of the Buick. He banged his elbows and knees getting in and out. The driver's seat cramped his legs, bending them too far at the knee, even when it was as far back as it would go.
In repose he always looked unhappy. He had that kind of face. His most genuine laughter looked forced. See him now, stalled in a traffic jam on the San Diego Freeway in a car too small for him. Stalled partway through a murder plan which was too complex to begin with...
He looked frantic. His brown eyes burned; his no-color hair had lost all semblance of civilization. His forgotten cigarette burned threateningly between white knuckles.
Ahead of the blue Cadillac was a Jaguar convertible whose custom paint job glowed with fiery tangerine brilliance. Ahead of that, a long gray anonymous Detroit car with huge delta fins. The gray car was stalled.
Someone behind Simpson was honking madly.
Cars poured into the gap in his lane, the gap ahead of the stalled car.
At Hermosa Beach the red tide was in. Trillions and quadrillions of plankton made a dirty red-and-brown soup of the ocean. By night the breakers glowed with cold blue fire. By night and day, the ocean air stank of too much life.
In the trunk of the Buick, Simpson's dun-colored Great Dane lay dead with a hole in his head. He was beginning to stiffen.
No room to get out of this lane. Simpson clenched his teeth and clung to his temper. Part of him wanted to stamp on the throttle and swoop out into the next lane, and damn the car that got in his way! But there was Harvey in the trunk, with his head in a Baggy. Simpson lit another cigarette.
What was Janet doing now? Who was she with? Did Simpson know him? No; Janet wasn't stupid, nor was the divorce yet final. Anyone with her now would be female.
Had she missed Harvey yet? Was she searching for him now, wondering how he'd got out, hoping he hadn't reached the street?
How would Janet look in the trunk of the Buick, with her head in a Baggy to hold the blood?
Cars swept by on the left and right, going ten and fifteen miles per hour.
A woman in a peach-colored dress got out of the gray car and opened the hood. She fiddled in the guts of the motor, then got back in. The gray car lurched forward. She'd fixed it! Amazing!
And the whole lane crawled off at ten miles per hour, southbound on the San Diego Freeway. Toward Simpson's tiny house on the Strand at Hermosa Beach.
Driving was torture. Ripples crawled backward along the lines of cars. Some deadhead in front was moving in spurts, and the spurts became waves traveling backward, communicating their motion to every car behind him. Accelerator, brake, accelerator, brake. Brake! Accelerate. Maddeningly slow. There was the car that had blocked the lanes, twisted across the right lanes with its side smashed in, a police car alongside. Now the lanes moved faster.
On Simpson's left they were getting up to speed. Simpson saw a gap. He twisted the wheel, depressed the throttle, and looked quickly over his shoulder. Nobody coming... he stamped on the throttle and brought his eyes back to the road.
Every car in his lane must have stopped dead the moment he turned his head. His foot was still on the throttle when he hit.
Discontinuity. He knew he was about to crash... and he was getting out to look at the damage. He'd bumped his head, and his ribs must have smacked hard into the steering wheel, but he had no trouble walking.
He walked through a nightmare.
The Buick's hood looked like a squashed banana. The fat man in the Cadillac was getting out, rubbing his thick neck, his eyes squinted against pain. Whiplash, thought Simpson, and moved toward him.
Then the weakness came, and Simpson dropped hard on his knees. The shock should have hurt, but it didn't. "Sorry," Simpson told the man. Sorry about your car, your neck. Sorry to be such a fool. Sorry, I feel weak. Sorry. He fainted.
He knew he had fainted, though he had not felt his chin hit concrete. Now, without transition, he was totally alert. But alert to what?
There was darkness around him, and a lack of sensation. No sound. Nothing to see or feel. No up or down. The position of his body was a mystery. He visualized himself in a hospital bed, his spinal cord severed at the neck, his eyes bandaged. The thought should have frightened him. It didn't.
Once hed smoked marijuana. It was unplanned; he'd seen some friends smoking a small-bowled cigarette pipe, using a mechanical roller to make their own cigarettes, and curiosity had got the better of him. He remembered the awful taste at the back of his nose, and the deep, all-embracing peace, and a queer somatic hallucination: the feeling that all the mass of his body had withdrawn into his feet, below a line drawn at the ankles. It seemed that he could lean as far as he liked in any direction and he would not fall, because his center of mass was only an inch above the floor.
The deep peace was the same, but now his body was entirely massless. As before, his memory was unimpaired. The body in the trunk, the crash... how, now, could he keep Harvey's death a secret?
But it didn't seem to matter.
Suddenly he knew why.
He was dead. Murray Simpson was a dead issue, an embarrassing mass of tissue associated with an equally embarrassing mass of torn metal. And that didn't matter either.
The voice spoke close in front of him. "That was silly, Simpson."
Simpson tried to move. Massless body? He had no body at all. He was a viewpoint. Blind, motionless, without sensation... he waited.
"The worst possible time to die is when you're involved in a murder." There was no character to that voice, no accent, no timbre, no emphasis, no loudness or softness. It was neither sharp nor dull, neither hoarse nor smooth. A voice with no handle. Like print in a typewriter, that voice.
Simpson said, "Murder?" To his own horror, his voice was exactly like the other's.
"Do you deny it?"
"I admit to killing a dog. My own dog, Harvey, a Great Dane."