"Daniel, Tony - A Dry, Quiet War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Daniel Tony)

quiet.
The bartender, old Thredmartin himself, reluctantly came over to me.
"What can I do for you, sir?" he asked me.
I looked over him, to the selection of bottles, tubes and cans on display behind
him. "I don't see it," I said.
"Eh?" He glanced back over his shoulder, then quickly returned to peering at me.

"Bone's Barley," I said.
"We don't have any more of that," Thredmartin said, with a suspicious tone.
"Why not?"
"The man who made it died."
"How long ago?"
"Twenty years, more or less. I don't see what business ofнн"
"What about his son?"
Thredmartin backed up a step. Then another. "Henry," he whispered. "Henry Bone."
"Just give me the best that you do have, Peter Thredmartin," I said. "In fact,
I'd like to buy everybody a round on me."
"Henry Bone! Why, you looked to me like a bad 'un indeed when you walked in
here. I took you for one of them glims, I did," Thredmartin said. I did not know
what he was talking about. Then he smiled an old devil's crooked smile. "Your
money's no good here, Henry Bone. I do happen to have a couple of bottles of
your old dad's whisky stowed away in back. Drinks are on the house."
And so I returned to my world, and for most of those I'd left behind it seemed
as if I'd never really gone. My neighbors hadn't changed much in the twenty
years local that had passed, and, of course, they had no conception of what had
happened to me. They only knew that I'd been to the war нн the Big War at the
End of Time нн and evidently everything turned out okay, for here I was, back in
my own time and my own place. I planted Ferro's desert barley, brought in peat
from the mountain bogs, bred the biomass that would extract the minerals from my
hard ground water, and got ready for making whisky once again. Most of the
inhabitants of Ferro were divided between whisky families and beer families.
Bones were distillers, never brewers, since the Settlement, ten generations
before.
It wasn't until she called upon me that I heard the first hints of the troubles
that had come. Her name was Alinda Bexter, but since we played together under
the floorplanks of her father's hotel, I had always called her Bex. When I left
for the war, she was twenty, and I twenty-one. I still recognized her at forty,
five years older than I was now, as she came walking down the road to my house,
a week after I returned. She was taller than most women on Ferro, and she might
be mistaken for a usa-human splice anywhere else. She was rangy and she wore a
khaki dress that whipped in the dry wind as she walked down the road. I stood on
the porch, waiting for her, wondering what she would say.
"Well, this is a load off of me," she said. She was wearing a brimmed hat. It
had ribbon to tie under her chin, but Bex had not done that. She held her hand
on it to keep it from blowing from her head. "This damn ranch has been one big
thankless task."
"So it was you who kept it up," I said.
"Just kept it from falling apart as fast as it would have otherwise," she
replied. We stood and looked at one another for a moment. Her eyes were green.
Now I had seen an ocean, and I could understand the kind of green they were.