zolko: переводы

→You never know, they might just learn this time.

→The Doctor watched them for a long time. Then he got down on the floor to help them. He started to pick up the remains of the bridge for them, but stopped. Leave that to them. Instead he helped them pick up the cars. Who knows, given enough time they might be able to figure out a way to shift the trains on their own, but he might as well give them a hand and save them a few years. He shrugged, smiled and started setting the cars back upright on the tracks. He'd be going away again soon, for some time, and the further along the way they were the better.

→A pile of beams they'd already retrieved stood next to them. Other workers were starting to manoeuvre a few of them back into position, putting the bridge back into place. A couple of surveyors, their work done, were moving on towards the remains of the river bridge.

→He leaned across to look over the edge. They were lowering a man on the end of the thread. As the Doctor watched, the man found his feet on the floor, walked over to the remains of the fallen bridge and grabbed one beam. The work party up on the layout then began to hoist him back up.

→Then he spotted the work crew. They were standing clustered by where the bridge to the bookshelf had stood. They were reeling out a spool of thread they'd found somewhere off the edge of the table.

→He picked up the headless digger and, with a merciful squeeze of a thumb and finger, he switched it off. You can't mend people, he remembered a voice saying. He spent so much of his time trying to do just that - keeping their little worlds from tumbling into chaos when they didn't know how to cope with running them themselves. Helping them learn how to put the pieces of themselves back together. But somehow all his work ever did was make them depend on him more and more, make it more and more impossible for them to go on without him. The rails he was on always led him back to the same place again. It would never change.

→The Doctor sat in front of the layout and put his head in his hands. He should have known better. You have to watch these things. You can't let them get out of control. He should have known better. If you give them the chance to grow on their own, they're bound to bring things crashing down around them. Look at what happened with the humans' Transit system. He should have known better. He had known better, back when he first built the layout, but he was so much older then. He really didn't want to be that old again.

→With two lines out of service and every train running late, the fabric of agreement and compromise which held the system together began to unravel - engineers started cutting each other off at points or gunned their motors to make time. The Raymond Loewy streamline jumped the rails on a curve and ploughed into the little rural whistle stop, demolishing the balsa-wood shelter and crushing the waiting passengers underwheel. The 1920s New York electric commuter train, unable to slow down in time, broadsided an arthritic freight train at a set of points. Two engines were left waiting on the Bookshelf Line bridge, which gave way under the sustained weight. The civilian construction gang kept laying their line till they reached the river, at which point they blithely stepped in and got swept away by the current. It must have only been a few more minutes before the end, when the Commodore Vanderbilt and the Metroliner met head-on on the southern river bridge and demolished the whole thing.

→As far as he could reconstruct, it had begun when a group of passengers, impatient at waiting for the trains, had set out across the countryside on foot. One of them was hit by the Union Pacific express and got caught between its wheels, causing a spectacular derailment which took out the entire Central Line. As the rail workers struggled valiantly to move the toppled cars, which weighed hundreds of times more than they did, the knock-on delays caused more passengers to abandon the platforms. Another group of passengers picked up tools and started to lay track themselves, unthinkingly, as if the mere presence of a disconnected stretch of rails would cause a train to appear on it. They built their track-bed straight towards their destination, without regard for the rest of the rail lines. When they laid their new tracks directly across the north spur of the Mountain Line, the next catastrophe was inevitable.

→The Doctor collapsed into the chair in front of the layout. How could this have happened? A few scattered passengers were still standing unawares on the surviving platforms. Dear heavens, they hadn't even realised what was happening as it happened. His head slowly shook back and forth, his jaw hanging slack.

→Engines and cars lay strewn across the tracks, in the river, in a pile on the floor between the layout and the bookshelf. A lone digger wandered in circles, his pick jerking up and down in front of him, sparks arcing where his head had been. The Raymond Loewy streamline engine had somehow embedded itself nose-first in the papier-mache mountain. As he watched, the last surviving train, the little Mickey Mouse handcar, trundled up to the spot where the southern river bridge had once stood and fell into the river with a plop.

→And the Doctor looked at the model train set and saw it was good. He'd set it up, let it go and it had become something greater than he could have done on his own. I thought I could, the Doctor chuckled to himself, I thought I could, I thought I could. Then one thing led to another, as things tend to do, and after a while the Doctor went away. It was just for a little adventure outside the TARDIS, a chance to wander through a world that was so much larger than he was. When he was finished letting the waves of the world's motion wash over him, he went back to his study.

→Finally he took control of the 1920s New York electric commuter train and sent it weaving through the layout, his own trail dodging and zooming among the gorgeous shifting complexity swirling around him. He was grinning like the six year-old he'd been centuries ago. The waves of motion which surrounded him were astounding and the details of each piece in motion were mesmerising.

→The Doctor barely moved or blinked for the next three hours. It took him that long to get even a glimpse of the marvellous complex rhythm the clockwork men had fallen into. The trains criss-crossed and outraced each other, dodging each other partly through careful scheduling and partly through fast reflexes and luck. One train could meander from the mountains to the shore like a wandering thought or streak from Central to the rural whistle stop at the far edge in thirty seconds flat. The trains played nice - followed the signals, got out of the way when one of them was in a hurry - and every ten minutes an express ran out along the Bookshelf Line to the new depot they'd set up by War and Peace. The Doctor closed his eyes and just listened to the ebb and flow of the rattle of wheels, clattering over the soft hum of the TARDIS itself.

→When he returned several hours later, the locomotive didn't look any different from the outside. He'd very carefully hidden all the additional wires and control circuitry beneath the surface. He replaced the engine in the roundhouse and couldn't resist waving his fingers at the inch-tall figure now standing in the locomotive's cab. Aside from his blue-and-white engineer's cap, the young blond mechanical man was dressed in an outfit vaguely like that of an Edwardian cricketer.

→He tore himself away from the sight of the crew and let his hands flutter over the trains in the railyard. Which to do first? He lifted one locomotive, a replica of the New York Central's Commodore Vanderbilt, out of the railyard and dashed from the room with it.

→He stared raptly as they reached the Central Line terminal, as the surveyors took a new batch of sightings and the work crew split in half. One crew headed down the path of the old Central Line, while the other curved away on a new route towards the mountains. More workers, who had been waiting patiently by the railyard, hurried over to join the crews, lugging a set of points with them. The Doctor couldn't help it; his face split into a wide grin.

→The Doctor watched them, his eyes wide with awe.

→He opened the new box and let the clockwork men march out. This new batch of people were painted in work clothes: toy soldiers with shovels and scrapers, clustering around the end of the track at the edge of the railyard. Two of the men in the lead set up miniature surveyor's tripods and quickly took a series of sightings in the direction of the Central Line terminal. The other little men stood motionless, the tiny positronic processors in their die-cast heads chattering silently over their wireless network.

→He stepped back for a moment, admiring his handiwork. Then he dashed out of the room again, to return with another box bumping and rattling under his arm.