"Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The Final Circle of Paradise (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

We stopped by a long open car. Ahmad threw the suitcase
into the back seat and flung the door open for me.
"Please," he said.
"Presumably you have already passed through them?" I
asked, sliding into the seat.
He got in behind the wheel and started the engine.
"What exactly do you mean?"
"The twelve circles of paradise."
"As for me, Ivan, a long time ago I selected my favorite
circle," said Ahmad. The car began to roll noiselessly through
the square. "The others haven't existed for me for quite a
while. Unfortunately. It's like old age, with all its
privileges and deficiencies."
The car rushed through a park and sped along a shaded,
straight thoroughfare. I kept looking around with great
interest but couldn't recognize a thing. It was stupid to
expect to. We had been landed at night, in a torrential rain;
seven thousand exhausted tourists stood on the pier looking at
the burning liner. We hadn't seen the city - in its place was
a black, wet emptiness dotted with red flashes. It had rattled,
boomed, and screeched as though being rent asunder. "We'll be
slaughtered in the dark, like rabbits," Robert had said, and I
immediately had sent him back to the barge to unload the
armored car. The gangway had collapsed and the car had fallen
into the water, and when Peck had pulled Robert out, all blue
from the cold, he had come over to me and said through
chattering teeth, "Didn't I tell you it was dark?"
Ahmad said suddenly, "When I was a boy, we lived near the
port and we used to come out here to beat up the factory kids.
Many of them had brass knuckles, and that got me a broken nose.
Half of my life I put up with a crooked nose until I had it
fixed last year. I sure loved to scrap when I was young. I used
to have a hunk of lead pipe, and once I had to sit in jail for
six months, but that didn't help."
He stopped, grinning. I waited awhile, then said, "You
can't find a good lead pipe these days. Now rubber truncheons
are in fashion: you buy them used from the police."
"Exactly," said Ahmad. "Or else you buy a dumbbell, cut
off one ball and there you are, ready to go. But the guys are
not what they used to be. Now you get deported for such stuff."
"Yes. And what else did you occupy yourself with in your
youth?"
"And you?"
"I planned on joining the interplanetary force and trained
to withstand overstress. We also played at who could dive the
deepest."
"We too," said Ahmad. "We went down ten meters for
automatics and whiskey. Over by the piers they lay on the
seabed by the case. I used to get nosebleeds. But when the fire
fights started, we began to find corpses with weights around