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

Today, like most days, there had been no Pis. Which was good news as
far as Deke was concerned. The bad news was that, this time round,
there had been very little to look at, and absolutely nothing worth
recording. The sky on the bank of screens in front of him had been
depressingly empty of cloud. The airborne drifters, whose multi-hued,
ever-changing forms fired his imagination, had wandered over the far
horizon leaving behind a bland hazy canvas; a smoothly-graded wash of
colour which began right of screen as pale violet blue and changed
imperceptibly to pale yellow on his left.

Deke reached over the back of his chair and picked up a cup of java
from the table behind him. Java was the synthetic, third millennium
equivalent of the pre-Holocaust drink known as coffee; a minor
historical fact Deke had uncovered during one of his occasional dips
into the video archives. As he blew on it and took a trial sip he saw,
out of the corner of his eye, a brief flash of light in the top
right-hand corner of the screen fed by Camera One - fitted with a six
hundred millimetre telephoto lens and known to the watch-tower crews as
'Zoomer'.

Deke knew that the pin-point flash of light he had glimpsed on the
screen could only be caused by sunlight bouncing off the wings of a
Federation Skyhawk - but he was puzzled by the lack of prior radio
contact.

Wagon-trains putting up air patrols always informed way-stations if any
of their aircraft were likely to enter its precinct - a notional circle
drawn around its overground location with a radius of ten miles. It
was not just a matter of courtesy. Under a procedure known as PAL
(Precinct Air Liaison) tower crews, when notified of overflights, would
monitor the appropriate radio channel for any distress calls and, by
maintaining a sky watch for the duration of the patrol, could provide
invaluable help in any subsequent search and rescue operation.



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Just when Deke thought he must have been imagining things, Zoomer
zeroed in on a small, blurred, bluish object. Whatever it was was now
inside the extreme range of the lens. Using the keyboard, Deke called
for maximum resolution. He was confidently expecting the blur to
resolve itself into the familiar shape of a Skyhawk but to his surprise
the object on the screen did not have the normal three-wheeled cockpit
pod, cowled pusher engine and the inflated delta wing with the
colour-coded tips that showed which wagon-train it belonged to.

No . . . this might be a flying machine but it had not