"Varley, John - Millennium" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

The head of the wimp-building team trailed me all the way to the door.
He kept trying to apologize and I kept ignoring him If there was blame, it was mostly mine, but I didn't want to say that. Like plugging into life-support equipment, I view apologizing as a dangerous vice that can take over your whole life if you give in to it. Inside, I was whipping myself severely for pulling a tyro stunt like leaving my squealer in the ready-
room. Outside, I trust, I was at work and the man's apologies simply got in my way.
I had wasted five whole minutes in there. I would never know if those minutes were the margin between life and death for Pinky.
I wasted fifteen more seconds just getting through the door.
There were no procedures for it. The whole goat-sorting operation was designed to prevent anybody getting through easily. But with a few quiet, totally sincere death threats, I managed it. I raced up to Operations, told Lawrence to put every available operative on the search for Pinky's stunner in the city from which the flight had originated -- which I learned was Houston -- got him to extend the bridge again, and ... stepped ... through the Gate.
It was a shambles.
They had looked just about every place it was possible to look, and they had not been gentle. The aisle was knee-deep in torn seat cushions. The carpet was ripped up. The contents of the galley were strewn from nose to tail of the plane. Tiny bottles of booze clinked underfoot.
To make everything worse, the customized wimps began arriving.
So much. time had already been wasted that we had to hurry getting them placed. We seated a few and strapped them in, but most we just threw. We had our portapaks on full power, and we were strong. Instead of just enriched blood, adrenalin, and vitamins -- the wake-up mixture -- we were now getting an insane brew of hyperdrenalin, methedrine, Essence of Hysteria, TNT, and Kickapoo Joyjuice. We picked up those half-corpses and tossed them around like beanbags. I could have tom sheet metal with my eyebrows.
Three-quarters of the wimps had been through the process I had recently seen firsthand.
They looked exactly like the people they were replacing. To save time, the other quarter came premutilated. Most were hideously burned. Some were still smoking.
One is supposed to say the smell of charred human flesh is revolting. It's not actually. It smells pretty good.
Most of the wimps were still breathing. They'd existed an average of thirty years in the wimp tanks, kept alive by machines, exercised mechanically to keep the muscle tone.
Theoretically they didn't have the brains to breathe, but the fact is they were too dumb to stop. Most would still be breathing when they hit the ground.
It didn't take long to get them all through. When we were done we still had three minutes and forty seconds. I sent one of the team back to the future to see if anyone had located the stunner in Houston. The rest of us kept looking for it on the plane. The messenger returned with the expected bad news, and now we had two minutes and twenty seconds.
Pinky had calmed down, if you could call it that. She was no longer crying. I believe she was paralyzed with terror. I found Lilly Rangoon, the squad leader, and pulled her aside.
"I don't know Pinky well," I said. "What does she have in the way of twonkies?"
"Nothing. She's clean." Lilly looked away from me.
That's a rarity. We were talking about such things as artificial legs, kidneys, eyes -- medical implants of any kind that were too advanced for 1955. Pinky was a healthy girl. She would be a great loss to the teams, if for no other reason than that.
At the same time, her lack of medical anachronisms made Lilly's job a little easier. It would have fallen to Lilly to cut those items out and bring them back with us.
"Thirty seconds," someone called out.
"There's a minute leeway," I said. "We'll have to go on the dick. You stay long enough to get her skinsuit and -- "
"Shut your freaking mouth! I know my job. Now get out of my aircraft."
Nobody talks to me like that. Nobody. I looked into her eyes. If looks could freeze I'd have been a one-legged pop side.
"Right," I said. "See you in fifty thousand years."
I hurried to the front, where everyone was hanging back, away from the Gate. Nobody wanted to go. Neither did I. It would have been a lot easier to ride it in.
I looked back and saw Pinky hand something floppy to Lilly. I knew it was Pinky, though it didn't look like her, because there was no one else it could be. The floppy thing was her skinsuit. She was no longer a sexy stewardess; without her disguise she was a terrified, naked little girl.
Lilly gave her a salute which Pinky did not have the will to return, and sprinted toward me.
"Start walking through, or I start kicking ass," I said.
They did. I turned to Lilly.
"How old was she?" I asked.
"Pinky? She was twelve."
I didn't make the rule. I'm not trying to absolve myself by saying that. I think it's a good rule. If we didn't have it, I'd write it myself.
No hardware gets left behind. The penalty for carelessness is death. You bring it back, or you stay with it.
We couldn't always work it the way we did with Pinky. That was the best way. It could be done because this flight would hit so hard and burn so fiercely that no one would expect to recover more than fifty percent of the body in any form at all. If they got ten identifiable corpses it would be miraculous, so one girl who shouldn't be there would never be noticed.
Even so, Lilly's last act before leaving the plane was to grab a wimp of about Pinky's body mass and toss it back into the future. The balance is critical.
The worst way? If we'd had to bring Pinky back with us for temporal reasons, Lilly would have stood her up against the wall and shot her. And then, possibly, have shot herself. I had a team leader do that once. "
Nobody ever said it was easy duty.
I came through the right way this time. I still didn't have my squealer, but Operations knew that now, and knew nobody but snatchers would come through the Gate until they closed it for good. Which they were preparing to do.
We all fetched up at the padded Team Recovery Area. Medics were waiting all around us, like crash trucks at an airport. We all made hand signals that we were okay except one girl who wanted a stretcher.
It's traditional just to lie there for five or ten minutes. Our portapaks had automatically returned to normal operation when we passed through the Gate, so our hysterical strength was fading fast. Behind it was the exhaustion the drugs had masked, both physical and mental.
But I had to get up.
"Reward time," I said, as I grabbed Lilly's weapon and headed for the door to Operations.
"One hour at full power. Set 'em up, girls."
"See you in intensive care, Louise," one of them called out, twisting the dial on the portapak strapped to her wrist.
"Tell my dear mom I died grinning, " yelled another.
I ran into Operations and confronted Lawrence. He was going through his checklist preparatory to shutting power to the Gate.
"One of my people is still on that plane," I told him. "I want you to keep the Gate focused on it until it actually touches the desert."