"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

Was I taking my work a bit too personally? Of course I was. My "personal
life" consisted of the occasional interface sex with Marge, which I had long
since come to loathe, watching my son sneaking around to sex machine parlors,
and the occasional trip there myself. My "personal life" had been stolen from
me by the Plague, by the Enemy, so of course I took my work personally.
I was obsessed. My work was my personal life. And I had a vision.
Cassette vaccines had been around for decades. Strip down a benign virus,
plug in sets of antigens off several target organisms, and hey, presto,
antibodies to several diseases conferred in a single shot.
Why not apply the same technique to the Plague? Strip one strain down to
the core, hang it with antigen coats from four or five strains at once, and
confer multistrain immunity. Certainly not to every mutation, but if I could
develop an algorithm that could predict mutations, if I could develop cassette
vaccines that stayed ahead of the viral mutations, might I not somehow be able
eventually to force the Plague to mutate out?
Oh yes, I took the battle personally, or so I admitted to myself at the
time. Little did I know just how personal it was about to become.

JOHN DAVID

No sooner had we finished mopping up in La Paz than my unit was airlifted
up to the former Mexican border as part of the force that would keep it sealed
until the SPs could set up their cordon. Through the luck of the draw, we got
the sweetest billet, holding the line between Tijuana and San Diego.
They kept us zombies south of the former border, you better believe they
didn't want us in Dago, no way they would let us set foot on real American soil,
but meatfucker, you wouldn't believe the scene in TJ!
Back before the Plague, the place had been one big whorehouse and drug
supermarket anyway. For fifteen years it had been a haven for underground
black-carders, Latino would-be infiltrators, black pally docs, dealers in every
contraband item that existed, getting poorer and more desperate as the cordon
around Mexico tightened.
Now TJ found itself in the process of becoming an American Quarantine
Zone, and it was Bugfuck City. Mexicans trying to get into Dago on false
passports and blue cards. Wanted Americans trying to get out to anywhere.
False IDs going for outrageous prices. Pussy and ass and drugs and uncertified
pharmaceuticals and armaments going for whatever the poor bastards left holding
them could get.
And the law, such as it was, until the SPs could replace the Legion, was
us, brothers and sisters. Unbelievable! We could buy anything-drugs, phony
blue cards, six-year-old virgins, you name it--or just have what we wanted at
gunpoint. And money hand over fist, I mean we looted everything with no law but
us to stop us, and did heavy traffic in government arms on top of it.
Loaded with money, we stayed stoned and drunk and turned that town into
our twenty-four-hour pigpen, you better believe it! No one more so than me,
brothers and sisters, with those marks coming out, knowing this could be my last
big night to Party.
I scored half-a-dozen phony blue cards and corroborating papers to match.
I stuffed my pockets with money. I shot up with every half-baked pally TJ had
to peddle, and they had everything from Russian biologicals to ground-up nun's