"Marta Randall - On Cannon Beach" - читать интересную книгу автора (Randall Marta)

On Cannon Beach
by Marta Randall
For the students of Haystack '83
Toleman found me slumped near my equipment, said he
couldn't afford to lose me, too, and gave me a week's
leave. Typical of him; a week was not long enough to
catch a transport out of the Rainier Ice Station and back
again, and not long enough to go anywhere on foot - he
wanted me close by, where his generosity could be easily
interrupted by the unfortunate press of work. So sorry,
my dear. Unavoidable. Here's your cryometer - go.
Of the original fourteen on the crew, only seven of us
remained and we knew Toleman well enough to anticipate
his acts of generosity and work around them. That night
Marti accidentally misplaced the keys to Toleman's
LandCat, Jerry accidentally forgot to lock the transport
pool door, and Gretch accidentally left two full cans of
gas strapped in place. I took off well before dawn. A
week of being short-handed would cool Toleman's anger
at the theft - it always did.
The drive south was depressing. Small, sad towns
littered the sides of the collapsing highway, their empty
buildings and icy streets interrupting blasted brown fields
or the skeletons of forests. Neither roads nor habitations
had been built to withstand great cold and the ice had
come quickly: increasing cloudiness had given us
progressively colder summers, until one hard winter laid
down the first ice, and the next cool summer had not
melted the pack. A second hard winter deflected more of
the sun's heat; the next summer the nascent glaciers
bounced even more sunlight back to space. The pattern
established itself: a colder winter, a colder summer, and
now glaciers marched down the sides of mountains linking
one to the other and freezing the northern latitudes. For all
our observing and metering and evacuating, this sudden,
speedy ice age was upon us and no one, least of all the
beleaguered scientists, could tell when, or if, it would end.
Hard winters were now a foregone conclusion; cold
destroyed the work of hands and by next January this
land, too, would be under the ice.
I slept that night in a schoolhouse amid the detritus of
evacuation. MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER BUILT THIS TOWN read a
spray-painted message on the wooden door. I put my
fingertips to the words. Salvage crews had been through
the area already, taking whatever they found necessary and
important and removing it to the increasingly crowded
south. But who would save the real memories, the
important, mundane trivia of the world before the ice? Not
me. My job was to monitor the glaciers, measure the
progress of the hungry ice, observe the rubble of broken