"Robert F. Young - Passage to Gomorrah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

a business trans-action and nothing more.
StillтАФ
He turned angrily on his side, tried to shut her from his mind. She can go to hell, he thoughtтАФ
But she didn't. She went to New America, instead. He ac-costed her on a sunny avenue in Little
Chicago and they turned, hand in hand, down a narrow street lined with transplanted maples. The
sea-son was spring, and the warm air had activated the thermo-statically controlled Hi-Fi's hidden in the
foliage, and the air was filled with the singing of robins. After a while they came to a shaded walk that
wound up to a secluded cot-tage, and they walked through scented coolness to the door. He noticed,
then, that all the while they'd been walking, she'd been wearing nothing but a towel; and it must have been
raining, too, despite the sunshine, for her shoulders were glistening with rain-drops, and raindrops
twinkled on her long, tanned legsтАФ
He was sitting up on the couch. He was sweating. "I'll be damned!" he said. There was a persistent
bell-like sound in his ears, and presently he recognized it as the beeping of the communi-cator. He got
up, then, and went into the control room and picked up the neatly typed message which the receiver had
emitted:

From: Port Authority, Wine-Women-and-Song, Thais
To: Nathaniel Cross, Pandora
A Priori disturbance reported bulding up in path of your reality-flow. Emerge into normal
space at once and await further instructions. Acknowledge.

Cross stared at the words. Was the Lady Berenice clair-voyant? Had she known there was going to
be a storm?
He hurried toward the con-trol panel. Suddenly he thought of the towel again, the towel and the
deliberate shower. He tried to tell him-self that there was nothing unethical in a lady of the stars trying to
work off her passage, but it didn't do any good, and his anger kept in-tensifying till it superseded his
common sense, till it transformed him from a sea-soned pilot into a frustrated schoolboy. The control
panel simply hadn't been designed to be operated by a frustrated schoolboy, and when his fin-gers
sought to punch out the pattern that would snap the Pandora back into normal space, they punched,
instead, a set of symbols sufficiently unintelligible to activate the alarm.
The alarm performed a two-fold function: it alerted authorized persons and, at the same time, it
temporarily incapacitated the particular unauthorized person who had triggered it. Cross staggered back
against the bulkhead, his fingers tingling from the au-tomatic shock, his body going numb. He slid slowly
to the deck, still conscious but unable to move his limbs.
The first wave of the storm struck, and the ship began to shimmer. Lying there, watching the room
dissolve around him, he experienced a strange interval of detachment, and he wondered curiously how
much he really knew about himself: whether the outrageous mistake he had just made had been the result
of his anger, or whether his anger had merely been a trumped-up excuse for mak-ing the mistake;
whether the entire action had not resulted from a masochistic desire to participate in the Lady Bere-nice's
past. . . .

The tree was much taller than he had thought, and he wished now that he hadn't been in such a hurry
to join the club. He had swum the river all right, and he had gone through Devil's Cave without flinching.
But you could conquer your fear of water. You could conquer your fear of darknessтАФ
Height was something dif-ferent.
He shinnied a little higher on the trunk, gazed yearning-ly up to the last fork, where the highest limb
began its graceful journey into the summer sky. He heard the taunts of the other boys from the meadow
below. They did not think he could make it. In a way, they didn't want him to make it. If he made it, they
wouldn't have anyone to pick on till another new boy moved to town.
Well, he'd show them!