"Allen Steele - A King of Infinite Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

to Pearl Jam instead.

Erin and Shemp get in an argument. The car almost veers off the shoulder right in front of the cops
directing traffic to the interstate. I yell for Shemp to keep his eyes on the road. Shemp grabs the wheel
and gets the Saturn back in his lane. For a moment I'm afraid that the cops are going to flag us for a
roadside check, but their flashlights wave us through.

Shemp makes the turn for the interstate ramp.

Erin slips Ten into the deck. Eddie Vedder serenades us with a song about a woman trying to seduce her
son as we join a dense river of eastbound headlights: cars, trucks, RVs driven by middle-aged tourists
making their way from country music palaces in Branson to downtown St. Louis and points beyond.

A car horn blares just behind us as Shemp swings into the center lane without using the left turn signal. I
try to tell him to take it easy, but he's raving about the vapor trails coming from the tail-lights in front of
him.

Erin turns down the music a little and tells him to concentrate on the road. Shemp grips the wheel with
both hands and stares straight ahead, but a minute later he catches a glimpse of a billboard for the Casino
St. Charles riverboat. That cracks him up for no accountable reason. He turns up the volume again.

I lie down on the backseat and stare up at the ceiling. My ears are buzzing, my clothes are sticking to me
like day-old chewing gum, my leg muscles are stiff and aching.

It's been a long day. All I want to do is go home.

I scratch at a mosquito bite under my right knee and think about putting some lotion on my sunburned
neck.

Shemp abruptly swerves into the right lane. Suddenly the backseat is flooded with harsh white light. A
truck horn bellows in rage. . . .

Something as big as God smashes into the rear bumper.

And now Shemp and Erin and I are all screaming at once, and Shemp panics and twists the wheel hard
to the right, and I look back just in time to see a Mack eighteen-wheeler munching the Saturn's rear

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 Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space


fender, and then I'm thrown from my seat as the car leaves the pavement and dives

down

a hill

and now everything is rolling rolling

rolling twisting