"Bradbury, Ray - The Martian Chronicles" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradbury Ray)

"No."
Now Tomсs laughed. "You're blind!"
"I see very well. You are the one who does not see."
"But you see the new _town_, don't you?"
"I see nothing but an ocean, and water at low tide."
"Mister, that water's been evaporated for forty centuries."
"Ah, now, now, that _is_ enough."
"It's true, I tell you."
The Martian grew very serious. "Tell me again. You do not see the city the way I describe it? The pillars very white, the boats very slender, the festival lights--oh, I see them _clearly!_ And listen! I can hear them singing. It's no space away at all."
Tomсs listened and shook his head. "No."
"And I, on the other hand," said the Martian, "cannot see what you describe. Well."
Again.they were cold. An ice was in their flesh.
"Can it be . . . ?"
"What?"
"You say 'from the sky'?"
"Earth."
"Earth, a name, nothing," said the Martian. "_But_ . . . as I came up the pass an hour ago. . ." He touched the back of his neck. "I felt . . ."
"Cold?"
"Yes."
"And now?"
"Cold again. Oddly. There was a thing to the light, to the hills, the road," said the Martian. "I felt the strangeness, the road, the light, and for a moment I felt as if I were the last man alive on this world. . . ."
"So did I!" said Tomсs, and it was like talking to an old and dear friend, confiding, growing warm with the topic.
The Martian closed his eyes and opened them again. "This can only mean one thing. It has to do with Time. Yes. You are a figment of the Past!"
"No, you are from the Past," said the Earth Man, having had time to think of it now.
"You are so _certain_. How can you prove who is from the Past, who from the Future? What year is it?"
"Two thousand and one!"
"What does that mean to _me?_"
Tomсs considered and shrugged. "Nothing."
"It is as if I told you that it is the year 4462853 S.E.C. It is nothing and more than nothing! Where is the clock to show us how the stars stand?"
"But the ruins prove it! They prove that _I_ am the Future, _I_ am alive, _you_ are dead!"
"Everything in me denies this. My heart beats, my stomach hungers, my mouth thirsts. No, no, not dead, not alive, either of us. More alive than anything else. Caught between is more like it. Two strangers passing in the night, that is it. Two strangers passing. Ruins, you say?"
"Yes. You're afraid?"
"Who wants to see the Future, who _ever_ does? A man can face the Past, but to think--the pillars _crumbled_, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?" The Martian was silent, but then he looked on ahead. "But there they _are_. I _see_ them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter _what_ you say."
And for Tomсs the rockets, far away, waiting for _him_, and the town and the women from Earth. "We can never agree," he said.
"Let us agree to disagree," said the Martian. "What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don't ask. But the night is very short. There go the festival fires in the sky, and the birds."
Tomуs put out his hand. The Martian did likewise in imitation.
Their hands did not touch; they melted through each other.
"Will we meet again?"
"Who knows? Perhaps some other night."
"I'd like to go with you to that festival."
"And I wish I might come to your new town, to see this ship you speak of, to see these men, to hear all that has happened."
"Good-by," said Tomсs.
"Good night."
The Martian rode his green metal vehicle quietly away into the hills, The Earth Man turned his truck and drove it silently in the opposite direction.
"Good lord, what a dream that was," sighed Tomсs, his hands on the wheel, thinking of the rockets, the women, the raw whisky, the Virginia reels, the party.
How strange a vision was that, thought the Martian, rushing on, thinking of the festival, the canals, the boats, the women with golden eyes, and the songs.
The night was dark. The moons had gone down. Starlight twinkled on the empty highway where now there was not a sound, no car, no person, nothing. And it remained that way all the rest of the cool dark night.


October 2002: THE SHORE