2022-07-15 14:44:45
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UNDERGROUND 197
Pustovalov began to retreat, noticing that the wall, slightly refracting, was moving under water, revealing for a moment a greater depth, but realized that it was too fast. He only managed to cover his face with his hand, and removing his hand, he saw that the wall had already passed through him and, turning pale almost to the point of invisibility, went out of the lobby into the street. It seemed that she had disappeared, but she went on - he saw how the sides of the horse under the stone St. George the Victorious flashed with a bluish light, and then the upper corner of the Leningradsky railway station.He ran out after him and looked at the sky, guessing that all this had something to do with the black spot. In the sky, in the opposite direction from the arc, two barely noticeable points were moving towards the wall, which at first seemed to be an optical illusion. Pustovalov watched them until they disappeared behind the roof of the vestibule.This is where the manifestation of si
UNDERGROUND 198
- He is here! - A woman's voice squealed right into Pustovalov's ear, which made him flinch and instinctively intercepted the rifle, and the floor crackled under him.- Ma-a-am! Well, don't! - There was a plaintive childish voice from the piano.Pustovalov recognized the notes of fear. He shook his head, but there was no one in the room.- I'm talking here! Here he is! - Hysterically repeated a female voice and gave Pustovalov even louder right in the face: - Here! Floats right here!“Le-e-ena,” drawled a male voice, apparently from the next room, “don’t scare the child.”The male voice tried to sound calm and slightly ironic, but Pustovalov heard weariness in it.- Mom, who is swimming? - There was another voice. This time behind Pustovalov.Also a child, but older. Teenager. Girl.The woman again squealed in Pustovalov's face, which made him wince.- Mom! The children cried out in unison.- Here he is! Looking straight at me!- Mum...- Not! Through me! On ... On ... Alena quickly g
UNDERGROUND 199
His legs were stiff, he couldn't feel them, but his face was wet with sweat. Behind the glass is darkness, no lights, only two bluish dots in the sky.Pustovalov sighed, realizing that he had seen a nightmare - the worst nightmare of his life. He only now realized that it was only the realism of the fear that made the nightmare so real, and that fear was still pounding in his chest, making him tremble.Out of habit, Pustovalov froze and listened. Yet something was not right. The hand slowly reached for the rifle. The second is for the doorknob. Opening the door silently, he saw huge footprints in the snow right under it. A chain of strange square footprints stretched in both directions along the all-terrain vehicle. Pustovalov noticed that the footprints were crawling on top of each other, had a multidirectional drag, and “stomped” in front of the door, which meant only one thing - someone had walked more than once in both directions or possibly around the all-terrain vehicle and look
UNDERGROUND 200
- Distortion. Or, if you like, curvature.“But why have we never experienced something like this before?”- Oh-oh-oh, - the old man laughed and reached for a Belgian chocolate bar, - this human dependence on the constants of the past!- You seem to be enjoying yourself.“For people like me, looking beyond the boundaries of human experience is a real feast. For the sake of this, we are ready to die even young, no matter how pathetic it may sound, but I am already a very old man. Imagine, to see live what has been hidden from you for sixty years in uncountable tensors, and occasionally flashed behind the monstrous meanings of formulas.- And it's irreversible?The old man looked at Pustovalov with strange thoughtfulness.- Here I learned a lot, in particular, to accept what surprises me and seems impossible, but still some things are given to me with particular difficulty.- What kind?- For example, your appearance here.Pustovalov chuckled.“You know, I have to thank you. I took the a
UNDERGROUND 201
A shapeless shadow separated from the darkness, and began to approach, gradually acquiring the outlines of a human figure. The figure was large, broad-shouldered, with long arms and a spherically perfect head, on which two parallel horns protruded.The one she was approaching knew that the “horns” were the folded-out eyepieces of a night vision device, he himself had the same ones. The figure stopped in front of him, raised a hand clenched into a fist and made several circular motions in front of its own chest.The observer knew what this gesture meant, although in practice he saw it for the first time: “I feel danger, but the source is unclear.”Without waiting for an explanation, he covered his face with his hands - the right lower part of the face, the left eyes and forehead. Then he put his left hand in the direction of the concrete fence and vigorously moved it back and forth.The sign language is very stingy, but the first understood what the second wanted to say: “I don’t under
UNDERGROUND 202
Coming up to him, Maurice found a crumpled fireman's heat-reflecting suit and smiled. We must pay tribute, although Maurice was not upset at all. He could have guessed right away that the trick with heat guns only made sense if you were already inside. It didn't matter now. Maurice knew that infrared sensors would not be a problem for him, like everything else that they had already prepared. He knew that the one they were waiting for would go very far, perhaps even manage to reach the very end. Of course, to the end, to which he is allowed to reach. That's why Maurice was here. And Maurice was rather upset if the one they were waiting for deceived his expectations.After walking a few more meters, Maurice saw a shining helmet with a visor-mirror in the bushes, and his smile grew wider. No, as long as he did not deceive his expectations.***Having reached the northern section of the bypass route, Kruchina quieted down and took a step. Moving along the trodden path, he soon came to two
UNDERGROUND 203
He appeared on the bridge in a couple of minutes. Maurice, who was sitting under the window of a high tower, calmly rose and aimed his rifle at him:- One, two, three, and well, freeze! - He said cheerfully.Pustovalov obeyed and, without raising his head, said:“Using your man as bait?” Clever.“You used yours to get out too, didn’t you?”Pustovalov raised his head. Maurice saw through the eyepieces of the night vision device that Pustovalov was without night vision devices and knew that he only saw the outline of a dark silhouette in the window.- Komsomolskaya, - Maurice nodded with a smile, - now I understand why Daniker began to be so lucky before his death.- You're confusing me with someone else. I happened to be there.“Just a subway passenger?”- Exactly.Maurice burst out laughing and at that moment Pustovalov disappeared. He quickly figured out that he just jumped through a hole in the bridge.Still laughing, Maurice jumped lightly onto the bridge and called out:"You're br
UNDERGROUND 204
The car ran into a minibus lying on its side, Boris opened the door, leaned half out of the passenger compartment, exposing his haggard face to the frosty wind. There was a false peace here. Distant screams and shots were drowned out by unobtrusive music, but this tiny lane adjoining Frunzenskaya Embankment bore little resemblance to the island of former life. Rather, the coldness of the future blew from him - the very one that none of them would ever find. Desolation oozed from the planed poplars gathering darkness, from the mangled cars sprinkled with snow, forever left after yesterday's accident, from under the architraves of the shifted "stalinok", from the black windows of the buildings deprived of power supply.Boris looked at the piece of paper with the address and saw how it was distorted by a five-centimeter wall, carved from a dark space ice floe. With a crackling, cascading arc, the wall passed through Windman and, outlining the front facade of a two-story Chinese restauran
Latest Chapter
Epilogue
From the panoramic window, Victor can see the San Francisco Bay, but the waters no longer impress him. He still can't get used to the Golden Gate, but the views are much duller in his research center. Somewhere out there, beyond the countryside, he discovered Sunnyvale Pond. This place reminded him of the Moscow region at all. However, this is rather a minus, Victor is too young to be nostalgic for his homeland.Out of habit, everything comes surprisingly easily to him. A psychologist friend said that there was nothing extraordinary in his phenomenon, he just pulled out a lucky lottery ticket called "beautiful parents." Victor won an international competition, and while still a student, he got a job at the Ames Research Center, and on Sunday he met the daughter of emigrants from Lithuania who work in Los Angeles. Dimon without exaggeration would put "ten". Victor never gave grades to girls. Dimon knows that Victor was born with a golden spoon in his mouth and tries to reach for him. Vi
209
An old photograph, hitting the slimy walls, slowly spinning like an autumn leaf, slowly falls into a deep well. The well is so deep and bottomless that the round hole at the top has long turned into a bright dot, and is about to completely disappear. And the photo keeps falling and falling. It depicts three boys, three of them are twenty-nine years old. One of them, dark-haired, with curly hair, stands in the middle, hugging his friends. It is slightly lower and seems to hang slightly on their shoulders. All three are smiling. The photo is old, you can see it not only in the crumpled corners, scratches and faded palette, but also in stretched sweaters and old-fashioned shirts with rolled up sleeves.The photo keeps spinning and spinning, and in one of the turns, the image on it changes. Now there are only two boys. They also hug each other and look into the camera with smiles, but the black-haired man standing between them is no longer there. It's like it never happened. Maybe it's a
208
The old man, Makarov, rushed after him, and only after them did the special forces pour out.Still running up, Boris saw a square hole in the center of the site - not at all like what he saw on the day of his last visit to the plant. Perfectly smooth, carved into cubes that were stacked near the tractor. Next to them lay a completely black device, which he saw in the photographs sent by the Special Metals Research Institute.Boris was the first to run up to the edge of the hole.Below, he saw what he had seen before - the shaft of the mine, only at the bottom of the bowl there was now a well. There was absolute bedlam going on: corpses, blood, weapons, overturned chairs, pieces of collapsed stairs and galleries. He did not immediately notice living people, but when he saw a figure crawling away from the wall, he immediately recognized it, although he had never seen it alive.- Daria! he shouted. - Daria Afanasyeva!The girl raised her head.Makarov, running up, heard Vindman's scream,
207
Before saying goodbye to life, Dasha managed to become a witness to strange events that replaced each other with kaleidoscopic speed. First, something flew from above right in the center and with a disgusting thud plopped behind the makeshift spectator box. Dasha could not see anything in such a short time, but for some reason she was sure that this was a human body. More terrible than the blow itself were the frightened cries.And here is how a deaf-mute worker jumped from the upper gallery, and with inhuman speed slipped somewhere into the darkness, she saw very well.Just then, a strange movement began. On the right, something overturned with a crash, and someone very frightened shouted something in an incomprehensible language. Apparently it was a command, because right there from the depths of the hall there was a coordinated stomp of feet.Dasha saw four of the six burner paws, above her, the other two were located on either side of her head. From above, the bright light of hang
206
Only one person directly looked at her - a stern, gloomy old man from the gallery on the second floor. She had seen him before, I think in the ninth block - an ordinary mute worker with the right of free movement. He seemed to her out of his mind, but in his current “hawkish” look there was some kind of repulsive meaningfulness, without a hint not only of compassion, but even of curbed hatred. He looked at her just like a log, dissatisfied with the fact that the log was too thin and would not give the required warmth. There was no life in that look, only cold. This is how a dead man who managed to challenge life itself would look.However, all this, even the dumb old man, she saw fragmentarily, as in a painful dream, and then completely disappeared, only the darkness above her head remained - real or in her imagination. She stopped hearing conversations, footsteps, and the creak of the wheels of the gurney; only dull pops were heard in her head, reminiscent of explosions of a gas-air
205
- Stole?Boris nodded, pointing to the picture.- On the day of the visit to Novikov, Colonel Basurov, a well-connected former member of the procurement commission of the Ministry of Defense, was with Pustovalov. Most likely, he played the role of an intermediary. He went missing that day. Since Pustovalov himself is a ghost and it is impossible to track his movements, we tracked Basurov's movements before he disappeared in the warehouse. And through him they came across a certain Dementiev. We interrogated him. Dementiev is a professional safecracker, it was he who helped Pustovalov steal the installation. He also said that there were two installations. That is, one working sample, and a spare case without filling - in fact, a dummy. But it looks like the real one. He confirmed that Pustovalov was going to sell the unit to Yasin after learning that he was behind her order on the black market. In addition to Basurov, another person went missing that day, previously in contact with Pus
204
The car ran into a minibus lying on its side, Boris opened the door, leaned half out of the passenger compartment, exposing his haggard face to the frosty wind. There was a false peace here. Distant screams and shots were drowned out by unobtrusive music, but this tiny lane adjoining Frunzenskaya Embankment bore little resemblance to the island of former life. Rather, the coldness of the future blew from him - the very one that none of them would ever find. Desolation oozed from the planed poplars gathering darkness, from the mangled cars sprinkled with snow, forever left after yesterday's accident, from under the architraves of the shifted "stalinok", from the black windows of the buildings deprived of power supply.Boris looked at the piece of paper with the address and saw how it was distorted by a five-centimeter wall, carved from a dark space ice floe. With a crackling, cascading arc, the wall passed through Windman and, outlining the front facade of a two-story Chinese restauran
203
He appeared on the bridge in a couple of minutes. Maurice, who was sitting under the window of a high tower, calmly rose and aimed his rifle at him:- One, two, three, and well, freeze! - He said cheerfully.Pustovalov obeyed and, without raising his head, said:“Using your man as bait?” Clever.“You used yours to get out too, didn’t you?”Pustovalov raised his head. Maurice saw through the eyepieces of the night vision device that Pustovalov was without night vision devices and knew that he only saw the outline of a dark silhouette in the window.- Komsomolskaya, - Maurice nodded with a smile, - now I understand why Daniker began to be so lucky before his death.- You're confusing me with someone else. I happened to be there.“Just a subway passenger?”- Exactly.Maurice burst out laughing and at that moment Pustovalov disappeared. He quickly figured out that he just jumped through a hole in the bridge.Still laughing, Maurice jumped lightly onto the bridge and called out:"You're br
202
Coming up to him, Maurice found a crumpled fireman's heat-reflecting suit and smiled. We must pay tribute, although Maurice was not upset at all. He could have guessed right away that the trick with heat guns only made sense if you were already inside. It didn't matter now. Maurice knew that infrared sensors would not be a problem for him, like everything else that they had already prepared. He knew that the one they were waiting for would go very far, perhaps even manage to reach the very end. Of course, to the end, to which he is allowed to reach. That's why Maurice was here. And Maurice was rather upset if the one they were waiting for deceived his expectations.After walking a few more meters, Maurice saw a shining helmet with a visor-mirror in the bushes, and his smile grew wider. No, as long as he did not deceive his expectations.***Having reached the northern section of the bypass route, Kruchina quieted down and took a step. Moving along the trodden path, he soon came to two
