Мир пустыни

The counterman was getting nervous.
Kerry Donalson was the last customer in the little cafe. The clatter of dishes had completely subsided and to either side of him the cracked white-tile counter and worn stools were bare and clean and empty. Although Kerry was a well-dressed man far into his forties, the counterman hovered disrespectfully around him, giving a perfunctory toweling to surfaces already spotless. Finally, his starchy apron a-crackle with audible irritation, he demanded, “You got far to go, Mister? It’s getting close to curfew!”
As if to emphasize the man’s words, a blinding dazzle of white light flared in the street outside, arching through the glass front of the cafe.
“Not far,” Kerry said and paid no attention to the lights. For thirteen years no street on Earth had been dark at night. And during all of those years without darkness Earth had been in a state of total war.
A young man had come into the cafe with the lights, and was making his way toward the far end of the counter. As the counterman turned toward the new customer, Kerry pointedly buried himself in the front page of the Times-Telegram. Behind his paper he turned his wrist to look at the dial of his watch. Half an hour before curfew, the message had said. I’ll come up and speak to you. But don’t speak to me.
Kerry knew the headlines by heart, for he had scribbled his personal blue-pencil okay on every story. For five years now he had been editor, and part owner, of the Times-Telegram. Yet he continued to study the columns, as if something might be hidden there that would give him a clue to the mystery which had led him to seek a possibly dangerous meeting with a total stranger.
The main story read: ex-government scientist affirms moon base possible. Earlier in the day Kerry had skimmed it professionally for typographical errors, and now he shrugged off the story itself with cynical amusement. It was nothing but a rehash of the usual hopeful platitudes. The moon base project had been definitely abandoned.
United Earth had been trying for twelve years to set a rocket on Luna, and before that, the Free Americas and the Asian Alliance had ruthlessly trampled one another in a futile race for a satellite station. But no drive, no known fuel could successfully propel a rocket beyond the outer limits of Earth’s gravity.
That afternoon, Kerry had received a phone call from a dead man. Ben Thrusher had been a rocket research-expert for the Government of the Free Americas, but a tragic accident had made him one of the earliest casualties in Earth’s war against the Pharigs. Or had it been an accident?
Farther up the counter, he heard the waiter grumble, “Counter’s closed, lad. Too near curfew. You want to get picked up by the Night Police?”
“I only came to meet a friend here,” the newcomer said.
Kerry, lifting his eyes from a routine headline, Pharig Atrocities Spark Curfew Crackdown in Dallas, looked up quickly and found himself staring at the face of a tanned youngster, maybe nineteen, maybe even younger. He was wearing blue jeans and a leather jacket.
“You must be Mr. Donalson?” the youngster said.
Kerry stood up. “And you’re Lewis Fallon?” he asked.
The youngster nodded and touched Kerry’s extended hand briefly.
“I thought you wouldn’t show up,” Kerry said. “Coffee?”
“No time,” Fallon said. “Like the man said, it’s near curfew, and we don’t want to get picked up by the Night Police, do we, now?” The youth spoke with a faint inflection of sarcasm, looking past Kerry at the recruiting poster which hung over the cash register.