"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора

pulled him away from Fank and dragged him from the car. He did not resist.
As he was pushed into the noisy mob, he saw two men in berets dragging the
writhing Fank to the yellow car, while three others in berets cleared a path
through the arm-waving crowd. Then, with a roar, the crowd closed in on the
wrecked car; the car lurched clumsily, rose in the air, and turned onto its
side. The crowd descended on it, still shouting and singing. Everyone had
been seized by a frantic ecstasy.
Maxim was driven back to the wall of a building and pressed against a
wet shop window. Craning his neck, he spotted the yellow car. It set off
with a brassy wailing noise. Forcing its way through the mob, it disappeared
from sight.

4.
By late evening Maxim had had it with the city. He was ravenous. He had
been on his feet all day, seen a great deal but under-stood almost nothing.
He did pick up several new words by eavesdropping on conversations and could
now identify some of the letters on signs and posters, but that was it. The
accident with Fank had disturbed him, yet he was relieved to be on his own
again. Independence was very important to him; it was something he had
lacked during his confinement in Hippo's fifth-floor termite's nest with its
miserable ventilation. Reviewing the entire situation, he decided not to
return to Hippo for the time being but to lose himself for a while. Sure,
courtesy to your hosts was important, but the chance to gather information
was something to be considered as well. Yes, it was damned important to
establish communication with these people, but a better opportunity to
gather information on his own would probably never turn up again. So
communication would have to wait.
The city amazed him. It bugged the earth. All movement took place
either along the ground or beneath it. The vast areas between buildings and
the sky above them were filled only with smoke, rain, and fog. The city was
gray, smoky, and drab. There was a sameness everywhere. Not in its buildings
- some were rather beautiful - nor in the monotonous swarming of crowds on
its streets; not in its eternal dampness, nor in the striking lifelessness
of its solid mass of stone and asphalt - its sameness resided in something
all-embracing, something very basic. It resembled the gigantic mechanism of
a clock in which every part is different, yet everything moves, rotates,
meshes, and unmeshes in a single, endless rhythm; where a change in rhythm
means only one thing - faulty mechanism, breakdown, stoppage. A strange
world, so unlike anything he had ever seen! It was probably a very complex
society governed by many laws. But there was one that Maxim had already
discovered for himself: conform, do as everyone else does in the same way as
everyone else. And this was precisely what he was doing. Melting into the
crowd, he entered gigantic stores under dirty glass roofs; together with the
crowds he left them, descended into the earth, squeezed into jammed electric
trains, and sped off somewhere amid incredible thundering; then, swept along
by the crowd, he ascended to the surface again to streets identical to the
ones he had just left.
Evening had fallen, and the feeble streetlights suspended high above
the ground had gone on. The main streets were now congested. Retreating from
the crowds, Maxim found himself in a half-deserted, poorly lit lane. He