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