"Ballard, J G - Cloud Scultors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ballard J G)

among the dunes where sonic statues had run to seed beside
a ruined studio. The owner had gone, abandoning the hangar-
like building to the sand-rays and the desert, and on some
half-formed impulse I began to drive out each afternoon.
From the lathes and joists left behind I built my first giant
kites and, later, gliders with cockpits. Tethered by their
cables, they would hang above me in the afternoon air like
amiable ciphers.
j One evening, as I wound the gliders down on the winch, a
j sudden gale rose over the crest of Coral D. While I grappled
S with the whirling handle, trying to anchor my crutches in
j the sand, two figures approached across the desert floor. One
was a small hunchback with a child's overlit eyes and a
deformed jaw twisted like an anchor barb to one side. He
scuttled over to the winch and wound the tattered gliders
towards the ground, bis powerful shoulders pushing me
aside. He helped me on to my crutches and peered into the
hangar. Here my most ambitious glider to date, no longer a
kite but a sail-plane with elevators and control lines, was
'. taking shape on the bench.
He spread a large hand over his chest. "Petit Manuel
i acrobat and weight-lifter. Nolan!" he bellowed. "Look at

this!" His companion was squatting by the sonic statues,
twisting their helixes so that their voices became more
resonant. "Nolan's an artist," the hunchback confided to me.
"He'll build you gliders like condors."
The tall man was wandering among the gliders, touching
their wings with a sculptor's hand. His morose eyes were
set in a face like a bored Gauguin's. He glanced at the
plaster on my leg and my faded flying jacket, and gestured
at the gliders. "You've given cockpit to them, major." The
remark contained a complete understanding of my motives.
He pointed to the coral towers rising above us into the
evening sky. "With silver iodide we could carve the clouds."
The hunchback nodded encouragingly to me, his eyes lit
by an astronomy of dreams.
So were formed the cloud-sculptors of Coral D. Although
I considered myself one of them, I never flew the gliders, but
I taught Nolan and little Manuel to fly, and later, when he
joined us, Charles Van Eyck. Nolan had found this blond-
haired pirate of the cafe terraces in Vermilion Sands, a la-
conic teuton with droll eyes and a weak mouth, and brought
him out to Coral D when the season ended and the well-to-do
tourists and their nubile daughters returned to Red Beach.
"Major ParkerCharles Van Eyck. He's a headhunter,"
Nolan commented with cold humour, "maidenheads." De-
spite their uneasy rivalry I realised that Van Eyck would
give our group a useful dimension of glamour.
From the first I suspected that the studio in the desert