"Norman Spinrad - Triceratops" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)
at a thousand feet. Without dropping any lower, I whipped the jumper northeast over the Bronx at
three hundred miles per hour. This area had been covered by tenements before the Insurrection, and
had been thoroughly razed by firebombs, high explosives, and napalm. No one had ever found an
economic reason for clearing away the miles of rubble, and now the scarred earth and ruined
buildings were covered with tall grass, poison sumac, tangled scrub growth, and scattered thickets
of trees which might merge to form a forest in another generation or two. Because of the crazy,
jagged, overgrown topography, this land was utterly useless, and no one lived here except some
bathetic remnants of old hippie tribes that kept to themselves and weren't worth hunting down.
Their occasional huts and patchwork tents , were the only signs of human habitation in the area.
This was really depressing territory, and I wanted to get Mr. Ito over it high and fast.
Fortunately, we didn't have far to, go, and in a couple of. minutes, I had the jumper
floating at five hundred feet over our objective, the only really intact structure in the area.
Mr. Ito's stone face lit up with such boyish pleasure that I knew I had it made; I had figured
right when I figured he couldn't resist something like this.
"So!" he cried in delight. "Yankee Stadium!"
The ancient ballpark had come through the Insurrection with nothing worse than some
atmospheric blacking and cratering of its concrete exterior walls.
Everything around it had been pretty well demolished except for a short section of old elevated
subway line, which still stood beside it, a soft rusty-red skeleton covered with vines and moss.
The surrounding ruins were thoroughly overgrown, huge piles of rubble, truncated buildings, rusted-
out tanks, forming tangled manmade jungled foothills around the high point of the stadium, which
itself had creepers and vines growing all over it, partially blending it into the wild, overgrown
landscape around it.
barbed-wire fence to keep out the hippies who roamed the badlands. A lone guard armed with a
Japanese made dicer patrolled the fence in endless circles at fifteen feet on a one-man skimmer. I
brought the jumper down to fifty feet and orbited the stadium five times, giving the enthralled
Ito a good, long, contemplative look at how lovely it would look as the centerpiece of his gardens
instead of hidden away in these crummy ruins. The guard waved to us each time our paths crossed-it
must be a lonely, boring job out here with nothing but old junk and crazy wandering hippies for
company.
"May we go inside?" Ito said in absolutely reverent tones. Man, was he hooked! He glowed
like a little kid about to inherit a candy store.
"Certainly, Mr. Ito," I said, taking the jumper out of its circling pattern and floating
it gently up over the lip of the old ballpark, putting it on hover at roof-level over what had
once been short center field. Very slowly, I brought the jumper down toward the tangle of tall
grass, shrubbery, and occasional stunted trees that covered what had once been the playing field.
It was like descending into some immense, ruined, roofless cathedral. As we dropped, the
cavernous triple decked grandstands-rotten wooden seats rich with moss and fungi, great
overhanging rafters concealing flocks of chattering birds in their deep glowering shadows-rose to
encircle the jumper in a weird, lost grandeur.
By the time we touched down, Ito seemed to be floating in his seat with rapture. "So
beautiful!" he sighed. "Such a sense of history and venerability. Ali, Mr. Harris, what noble
deeds were done in this Yankee Stadium in bygone days! May we set foot on this historic playing
field?"
"Of course, Mr. Ito." It was beautiful. I didn't have to say a word; he was doing a better
job of selling the moldy, useless heap of junk to himself than I ever could.
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