"Kate Wilhelm - Scream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

After a quick lunch of soy wafers and beer we went out singly to get the feel of the city and try to locate
any transportation we could.

I started with a map in my hand, and the first thing I did was put it back inside my pack. Except for the
general areas, the map was worthless. This had been a seawalled city, and the seawalls had gone: a little
break here, a crack somewhere else, a trickle of water during high tide, a flood during a storm, the
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pressure building behind the walls, on the land side, and inevitably the surrender to the sea. The water
had undermined the road system and eaten away at foundations of buildings, and hurricane winds had
done the rest. Some streets were completely filled in with rubble; others were pitted and undercut until
shelves of concrete had shifted and slid and now rested crazily tilted. The white sand had claimed some
streets so thoroughly that growth had had a chance to naturalize, and there were strip-forests of palm
trees, straggly bushes with pink and yellow flowers, and sea grapes. I saw a mangrove copse claiming the
water's edge and stopped to stare at it for a long time, with curious thoughts flitting through my brain
about the land and the sea in a survival struggle in which man was no more than an incidental observer,
here, then gone. The afternoon storm broke abruptly, and I took shelter in a building that seemed to have
been a warehouse.

The stench of mold and decay drove me out again as soon as the storm abated. Outside, the sun had
baked everything, the sun and rain sterilizing, neutralizing, keeping the mold at bay, but inside the
cavernous buildings the soggy air was a culture for mold spores, and thirty years, forty, had not been long
enough to deplete the rich source of nutrients. There was food available on the shelves, the shelves were
food, the wood construction materials, the glues and grouts, the tiles and vinyls, the papers neatly filed,
the folders that held them, pencils, everything finally was food for the mold.

I entered two more buildings, same thing, except that one of them had become a bat cave. They were the
large fruit bats, not dangerous, and I knew they were not, but I left them the building without contest.

At the end of the first day we had three bicycles and a flat-bottomed rowboat with two oars. I hadn't
found anything of value. The boat was aluminum, and although badly corroded, it seemed intact enough.
Trainor slouched in while J.P. was cooking dinner and the rest of us were planning our excursions for the
next day.

"You folks want boats? Found a storehouse full of them." He joined us for dinner and drew a map
showing the warehouse he had found. His freehand map was more reliable than the printed ones we had
brought with us. I suspected that he was salvaging what he could for his own boat. Unless he was a fool,
that was what he was doing. When Evinson asked him what else he had seen that day, he simply
shrugged.

"How's chances of a swim?" I asked Delia after we ate.

"No radiation. But you'd better wait for Corrie to run some analyses. Too much that we don't know to
chance it yet."

"No swimming, damn it!" Evinson said sharply. "For God's sake, Sax." He issued orders rapidly for the
next day, in effect telling everyone to do what he had come to do.