"Connie Willis - Jack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

he had heard something. I glanced up, afraid the bombers were coming back, but
couldn't hear anything over the anti-aircraft guns. Jack stood motionless, his head
down now, looking at the rubble.
"What is it?" I said.
He didn't answer. He snatched his torch out of his pocket and swung it wildly
round.
"You can't do that!" I shouted. "There's a blackout on!"
He snapped it off. "Go and find something to dig with," he said and dropped to
his knees. "There's someone alive under here."
He wrenched the banister free and began stabbing into the rubble with its broken
end.
 I looked stupidly at him. "How do you know?"
He jabbed viciously at the mess. "Get a pickaxe. This stuff's hard as rock." He
looked up at me impatiently. "Hurry!"
The incident officer was someone I didn't know. I was glad. Nelson would have
refused to give me a pickaxe without the necessary authorization and lectured me
instead on departmentalization of duties. This officer, who was younger than me and
broken out in spots under his powdering of brick dust, didn't have a pickaxe, but he
gave me two shovels without any argument.
The dust and smoke were clearing a bit by the time I started back across the
mounds, and a shower of flares drifted down over by the river, lighting everything in
a fuzzy, over-bright light like headlights in a fog. I could see Jack on his hands and
knees halfway down the mound, stabbing with the banister. He looked like he was
murdering someone with a knife, plunging it in again and again.
Another shower of flares came down, much closer. I ducked and hurried across
to Jack, offering him one of the shovels.
"That's no good," he said, waving it away.
"What's wrong? Can't you hear the voice any more?"
He went on jabbing with the banister. "What?" he said, and looked in the flare's
dazzling light like he had no idea what I was talking about.
"The voice you heard," I said. "Has it stopped calling?"
"It's this stuff," he said. "There's no way to get a shovel into it. Did you bring any
baskets?"
I hadn't, but further down the mound I had seen a large tin saucepan. I fetched it
for him and began digging. He was right, of course. I got one good shovelful and
then struck an end of a floor joist and bent the blade of the shovel. I tried to get it
under the joist so I could pry it upward, but it was wedged under a large section of
beam further on. I gave it up, broke off another of the banisters, and got down
beside Jack.
The beam was not the only thing holding the joist down. The rubble looked loose
тАФ bricks and chunks of plaster and pieces of wood тАФ but it was as solid as
cement. Swales, who showed up out of nowhere when we were 3 feet down, said,
"It's the clay. All London's built on it. Hard as statues." He had brought two buckets
with him and the news that Nelson had shown up and had had a fight with the spotty
officer over whose incident it was.
" 'It's my incident,' Nelson says, and gets out the map to show him how this side
of King's Road is in his district," Swales said gleefully, "and the incident officer
says, 'Your incident? Who wants the bloody thing, I say,' he says."
Even with Swales helping, the going was so slow whoever was under there would
probably have suffocated or bled to death before we could get to him. Jack didn't