"Aldiss, Brian W - Greybeard(2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

This it still did; one leg of it led to an old water mill where lived Big Jim Mole, the boss of Sparcot. The
other road had once been a main road. After the houses petered out, it led in each direction into the
stockaded wilderness of vegetation; there it was dragged down like a snake in a crocodile's throat and
devoured under the weight of undergrowth.
All the houses of Sparcot showed signs of neglect. Some were ruined; some were uninhabited ruins. A
hundred and twelve people lived here. None of them had been born in Sparcot.
Where two of the roads joined, there stood a stone building that had served as a post office. Its upper
windows commanded a view both of the bridge in one direction and the cultivated land with wilderness
beyond in the other. This was now the village guardroom and, since Jim Mole insisted that a guard was
always kept, it was occupied now.
There were three people sitting or lying in the old barren room. An old woman, long past her eightieth
year, sat by a wood stove, humming to herself and nodding her head. She held out her hands to the stove, on
which she was warming up stew in a tin platter. Like the others, she was wrapped against a wintry chill that
the stove did little to dispel.
Of the two men present, one was extremely ancient in appearance, although his eye was bright. He lay on
a palliasse on the floor, restlessly looking about him, staring up at the ceiling as if to puzzle out the meaning
of the cracks there, or at the walls as if to solve the riddle of their damp patches. His face, sharp as a stoat's
beneath its stubble, wore an irritable look, for the old woman's humming jarred his nerves.
Only the third occupant of the guardroom was properly alert. He was a well-built man in his middle
fifties, without a paunch, but not so starveling thin as his companions. He sat in a creaking chair by the
window, a rifle by his side. Although he was reading a book, he looked up frequently, directing his gaze
through the window. With one of these glances, he saw the patrol man with the colourful shirt approaching
over the pastures.
"Sam's coming," he said.
He put his book down as he spoke. His name was Algy Timberlane. He had a thick grizzled beard that
grew down almost to his navel, where it had been cut sharply across. Because of this beard, he was known as
Greybeard, although he lived in a world of greybeards. But his high and almost bald head lent emphasis to
the beard, and its texture, barred as it was with stripes of black hair sprouting thickly from the jawline and
fading out lower down, made it particularly noticeable in a world no longer able to afford other forms of
personal adornment.
When he spoke, the woman stopped her humming without giving any other sign she had heard. The man
on the palliasse sat up and put a hand on the cudgel that lay beside him. He screwed his face up, sharpening
his gaze to peer at the clock that ticked noisily on a shelf; then he squinted at his wristwatch. This battered
old souvenir of another world was Towin Thomas's most cherished possession, although it had not worked
in a decade.
"Sam's early coming off guard, twenty minutes early," he said. "Old sciver. Worked up an appetite for
lunch, strolling round out there. You better watch that hash of yours, Betty - I'm the only one I'm wanting to
get indigestion off that grub, girl."
Betty shook her head. It was as much a nervous tick as a negation of anything that the man with the
cudgel might have said. She kept her hands to the fire, not looking round.
Towin Thomas picked up his cudgel and rose stiffly to his feet, helping himself up against the table. He
joined Greybeard at the window, peering through the dirty pane and rubbing it with his sleeve.
"That's Sam Bulstow all right. You can't mistake that shirt."
Sam Bulstow walked down the littered street. Rubble, broken tiles and litter lay on the pavements; dock
and fennel - mortified by winter - sprouted from shattered gratings. Sam Bulstow walked in the middle of the
road. There had been no traffic but pedestrians for several years now. He turned in when he reached the post
office, and the watchers heard his footsteps on the boards of the room below them.
Without excitement, they listened to the whole performance of his getting upstairs: the groans of the bare
treads; the squeak of a horny palm on the hand rail as it helped tug its owner upwards; the rasp and heave of
lungs challenged by every step.