"Paul Preuss - Venus Prime 1 - Breaking Strain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preuss Paul)

distinctionтАУmuch too fine upon which to base a split-second decision.

Three TEUCER hypervelocity missiles leaped into the air as the Snark crossed the perimeter. They were
no more than shaped steel rods, dead rounds carrying no explosives, but they impacted with the
momentum of meteoroids, of flying bulldozers. Two-tenths of a second after they left the launcher they
ripped through the armored helicopter. There was no explosion. The disintegrated aircraft simply
scattered itself over the parade ground like a handful of burning confetti. The larger bits of smoking
metal rolled away like charred wads of newspaper.

III
Sparta waited among the bare aspens on the edge of the frozen field, waited until the buttery light had
faded from the cloud-clotted western sky. Her toes and fingers and earlobes and the tip of her nose were
numb, and her stomach was growling. Walking, she hadnтАЩt minded the cold, but when she finally had to
stand and wait for darkness sheтАЩd begun to shiver. Now that darkness had come, she could move in.

SheтАЩd garnered valuable information from the Snark beforeтАУin that split second when it had paused,
hovering motionless inches above the ground, computing new coordinatesтАУsheтАЩd jumped clear and sent
it on its unprotected way. Precisely where she was. Precisely what day, month, and year it was. That last

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 ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME I

had come as a shock. Memories had been swarming more thickly with every passing minute, but now
she knew that even the most recent of them was more than a year old. And in the hours since sheтАЩd
jumped, while sheтАЩd been trudging through the snow, sheтАЩd contemplated the burgeoning strangeness of
her sense of herself.

She grasped, viscerally, that in the past hourтАУeven had she not been indulging in self-inspectionтАУher
wild and surging sensibilities had started to bring themselves partially under her conscious control; sheтАЩd
even managed to remember what some of those sensibilities were for . . . and thus she could better
modulate the insistent vividness of her sensesтАУtaste, smell, hearing, touch. And her remarkably flexible
vision.

But those senses were still getting away from herтАУonly sporadically, but then overwhelmingly. The acid
sweetness of pine needles fallen upon snow threatened more than once to overcome her with swooning
ecstasy. The melting mother-of-pearl of the setting sun more than once sent the visible world a-spinning
kaleidoscopically, inside her throbbing brain, in an epiphany of light. She waited out those intoxicating
moments, knowing that in the scheme of things they must recur, knowing that when they did she could,
with effort, suppress them. Then she pressed on.

She had a much better understanding of the nature of her predicament. She knew it could be fatal if
anyone learned of her peculiarities, and equally fatal to put herself in the hands of the authorities, any
authorities.

At last it was dark enough to cover her approach. She trudged across the snowy field toward a far cluster
of lights where two narrow asphalt roads, recently plowed, formed a T intersection. One of the weather-
bleached wooden buildings had a sign hanging from its rusted iron eaves, lit by a single yellow bulb:
тАЬBEER. FOOD.тАЭ

Half a dozen cars were parked in front of the rustic tavern, sporty cars and all-terrain-vehicles with ski