"Bruce Holland Rogers - Lifeboat On A Burning Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

That's death."

"And then what?"

"Then, nothing," he told me. "Then we're dead. We just aren't any more -- no
thought, no feeling. Gone. Nothing."

He let me carry the watch around for a day. The next morning, the spring had run
down. I put the watch to my ear, and heard absence, heard nothing.

Even back then, lying awake in the dark with my thoughts of the void, I was
planning my escape.

Tick, tick, tick, went my heart, counting down to zero.

I wasn't alone. After my graduate work in neuronics, I found a university job
and plenty of projects to work on, but research is a slow business.

Tick, tick, tick.

I was in a race, and by the time I was fifty-six, I knew I was falling behind.
In fact, I felt lucky to have made it that far. We were living at the height of
terrorist chic. The Agrarian Underground and Monetarists were in decline, but
the generation of bombers that succeeded them was ten times as active, a hundred
times as random in their selection of targets. Plastique, Flame, Implosion. . .
. They gave themselves rock-band names. And then there were the ordinary street
criminals who would turn their splitter guns on you in the hope that your chip,
once they dug it out of your skin, would show enough credit for a hit of
whatever poison they craved.

Statistically, of course, it wasn't surprising that I was still alive. But
whenever I tuned in to CNN Four, The Street Beat Source, the barrage of
just-recorded carnage made me wonder that anyone was still alive.

Fifty-six. That's when I heard from Bierley's people. And after I had met
Bierley, after I had started to work with Richardson, I began to believe that I
would hit my stride in time, that Death might not be quite the distance runner
he'd always been cracked up to be.

I had known who Bierley was, of course. Money like his bought a high profile, if
you wanted it. And I had heard of Richardson. He was hot stuff in analog
information.

Bierley and Richardson were my best hope. Bierley and Richardson were magicians
at what they did. And Bierley and Richardson -- I knew it from the start -- were
unreliable.

Bierley, with his money and political charm, would stay with the project only
until it bored him. And Richardson, he had his own agenda. Even when we were
working well together, when we were making progress, Richardson never really