"Patrick Tilley - Amtrak 2 - First Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

of action he craved.

Never mind. Deke had devised his own backup entertainment. Swivelling
round in his chair, he slid open the bottom drawer of a stack under the
left wing of the desk, inserted his forearm and retrieved a video
cassette lying right at the back in the dead space between the
underside of the drawer and the floor.

Deke pushed the video cassette into the nearest record/play slot,
slipped a lightweight headset over his ears, started the tape running
and brought the picture up on the screen in front of him. It was a
dawn sequence, a deep rose-pink sky overhung with ragged clusters of
pale violet clouds. A thin soft-edged line of deep chrome yellow
appeared and spread swiftly north and south along the horizon,
heralding the rising sun. The sharp clear sounds of the illicitly-made
electronic sound track cut through the muzzy boredom that clogged his
brain and made his spine tingle with its forbidden rhythmic beat.

Reared at Nixon/Fort Worth and originally a lineman aboard the Rio
Bravo wagon-train, Deke had been caught in a Mute ambush on his third
operational tour and badly wounded in the legs. Although this
automatically qualified him for a home-base assignment, Deke had
applied for retraining as a VidComm Tech (OG) and had gotten himself
posted to the Tracker way-station at Pueblo. His eagerness to get back
to where the action was had been warmly commended by his superiors and
had earned him ten plus points at the next quarterly assessment. This,
in turn, had resulted in a welcome boost to his credit rating. The
added privileges that came with an upgraded ID-card could always be put
to good use but the real pleasure came from the knowledge that he had
beaten the system. Had the Assessors known the real reason behind
Deke's wish to return overground they would, without doubt, have been a
great deal less generous.

Deke was a covert cloud-freak. He had become addicted on his first
trip aboard the Rio Bravo and, since reaching Pueblo, had been using
the facilities in the watch-tower to secretly record the more
spectacular sunrises and sunsets on videotape. He had, of course, only
been able to do this when he was alone. Though most Trackers might
have considered it a distinctly bizarre way of passing the time,
looking at clouds did not, in itself, contravene any of the statutory
codes of behaviour laid down by the First Family; on the other hand,
making unauthorised video recordings certainly did.

Deke was not quite sure whether it was a Code Two or Code Three offence
but, either way, getting caught could be bad news, especially if - as
in this case - the videotape included a sound-track featuring a
proscribed form of music known as 'blackjack'. Hence the need for a
secure place in which to stash the tape - not an easy thing to find in
a Tracker way-station or indeed anywhere else, for there were few doors
and even fewer of them could be locked. In the Federation, the