"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

thousand square miles; it had lasted no more than a week, but in that time inflicted great damage to
the infrastructure. Much of the public part of the city was trashed. Rock Creek had torn out its
banks, and the Mall was covered by mud; the Tidal Basin was now part of the river again, with the
Jefferson Memorial standing in the shallows of the current. Many streets were blocked with debris;
worse, in transport terms, many Metro tunnels had flooded, and would take months to repair.
Alexandria was wrecked. Most of the region's bridges were knocked out or suspect. The power grid
was uncertain, the sewage system likewise; epidemic disease was a distinct possibility.
Given all this, certain repairs simply had to be made, and many were the calls for full restoration.
But whether these calls were greeted with genuine agreement, Tartuffian assent, stony indifference,
or gloating opposition, the result was the same: not enough money was appropriated to complete the
job.
Only the essentials were dealt with. Necessary infrastructure, sure, almost; and of course the
nationally famous buildings were cleaned up, the Mall replanted with grass and new cherry trees;
the Vietnam Memorial excavated, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials recaptured from their island
state. Congress debated a proposal to leave the highwater mark of greenish mud on the sides of the
Washington Monument, as a flood-height record and a reminder of what could happen. But few
wanted such a reminder, and in the end they rejected the idea. The stone of the great plinth was
steam-cleaned, and around it the Mall began to look as if the flood had never happened. Elsewhere in
the city, however....




IT WAS NOT A GOOD TIME to have to look for a place to live.
And yet this was just what Frank Vanderwal had to do. He had leased his apartment
for a year, covering the time he had planned to work for the National Science
Foundation; then he had agreed to stay on. Now, only a month after the flood, his
apartment had to be turned over to its owner, a State Department foreign-service person
he had never met, returning from a stint in Brazil. So he had to find someplace else.
No doubt the decision to stay had been a really bad idea.
This thought had weighed on him as he searched for a new apartment, and as a result
he had not persevered as diligently as he ought to have. Very little was available in any
case, and everything on offer was prohibitively expensive. Thousands of people had
been drawn to D.C. by a flood that had also destroyed thousands of residences, and
damaged thousands more beyond immediate repair and reoccupation. It was a real
seller's market, and rents shot up accordingly.
Many of the places Frank had looked at were also physically repulsive in the extreme,
including some that had been flooded and not entirely cleaned up: the bottom of the
barrel, still coated with sludge. The low point in this regard came in one semibasement
hole in Alexandria, a tiny dark place barred for safety at the door and the single high
window, so that it looked like a prison for troglodytes; and two thousand a month. After
that Frank's will to hunt was gone.
 Now the day of reckoning had come. He had cleared out and cleaned up, the owner
was due home that night, and Frank had nowhere to go.
It was a strange sensation. He sat at the kitchen counter in the dusk, strewn with the
various sections of the Post. The "Apartments for Rent" section was less than a column
long, and Frank had learned enough of its code by now to know that it held nothing for
him. More interesting had been an article in the day's Metro section about Rock Creek
Park. Officially closed due to severe flood damage, it was apparently too large for the
overextended National Park Service to be able to enforce the edict. As a result the park