"Robert Charles Wilson - The Chronoliths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson


Maybe Hitch was right. Maybe some dark miracle had landed in the province.
More likely there had been a forest fire or a narcotics shoot-out, but Hitch said the
caterers had told him it was тАЬsomething from outer spaceтАЭтАФand who was I to
argue? I was restless and facing the prospect of another empty day fielding JaniceтАЩs
complaints. And not relishing it. So I hopped on the back of HitchтАЩs Daimler, fuck
the consequences, and we motored away from the coast in a cloud of blue exhaust.
I didnтАЩt stop to tell Janice I was going. I doubted she would be interested; anyway,
IтАЩd be home by nightfall.
Lots of Americans disappeared in Chumphon and Satun in those days, kidnapped
for ransom or murdered for pocket change or recruited as heroin mules. I was
young enough not to care.


We passed the Phat Duc, the shack where Hitch supposedly sold fishing tackle but
in fact did a brisk trade in native marijuana to the party crowd, and turned onto the
new coast road. Traffic wasnтАЩt heavy, just a few eighteen-wheelers out of the C-Pro
fish farms, jitneys and songthaews decorated like carnival wagons, tourist buses.
Hitch drove with the verve and fearlessness of a native, which made the journey an
exercise in bladder control. But the rush of humid air was cooling, especially as we
turned onto the feeder road toward the interior, and the day was young and
pregnant with miracles.
Away from the coast, Chumphon is mountainous. When we turned inland we had
the road very nearly to ourselves, until a phalanx of border police roared past us in
a hail of gravel. So something was definitely up. We stopped long enough for
Hitch to relieve himself in a gas station hawng nam while I tuned my portable radio
to the English-language radio station out of Bangkok. Lots of U.S. and U.K. top
forty, no word of Martians. But just as Hitch came ambling back from the urinal
trough a brigade of Royal Thai soldiers roared past us, three troop carriers and a
handful of rattletrap humvees, going the same direction the local police had been
headed. Hitch looked at me, I looked at him. тАЬGet the camera out of the
saddlebag,тАЭ he said, not smiling this time. He wiped his hand on his shorts.
Up ahead, a bright column of fog or smoke spiked the tumbled hills.


What I did not know was that my daughter Kaitlin, five years old, had awakened
from her morning nap with a raging fever, and that Janice had wasted a good
twenty minutes trying to locate me before she gave up and took Kait to the charity
clinic.
The clinic doctor was a Canadian who had been in Chumphon since 2002 and had

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THE CHRONOLITHS by Robert Charles Wilson


established a fairly modern surgery with funds donated by some department of the
World Health Organization. Doctor Dexter, the beach people called him. The man