"Samuel R. Delany - High Weir" - читать интересную книгу автора (Delaney Samuel R)

Rimkin stood on the edge of the foundation and fanned his light toward the fallen
head. He approached across the sandy blocks. The smaller fragment of face lay like
a saucer. Its half-eye had cracks all through. Rimkin squatted before the major
portion of the face, leaned toward the fractured orb. He raised his flash, twisted
back the dispersal-grid so that the bright, singular beam fell on the broken circle:
flicker, and flicker, image and image. The fragmented orb began to weep the sights
of ages.

┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖┬╖


Dawn comes quickly on worlds with thin atmosphere. It climbed the dunes behind
Rimkin and laid its blazing hands on his shoulders. And the mechanism of his suit
began to hum and twitter about him to prepare for the two-hundred-degree rise
that would occur in the next twenty minutes.
"Rimkin тАж?"

Who was breathing in his ear?

"Rimkin, are you up there?"

The voices had been calling for some time. But with just a sound coming out of a
machine by your ear, how was he supposed to know what they were?

"Rimky, there you are! What are you doing? Have you been here all morning?"

He turned aroundтАФand fell over.

"Rimkin!"

He had been in one position for almost nine hours, and every muscle, once moved,
was in agony. In the pain fogging his vision like heat, he watched the boiled potato
jogging toward him in a cloud of fiery dust.

Through his gasps he kept on trying to get out: "Why тАж who are тАж which тАж who
areтАФ?"

"It's me, Evelyn."

Evelyn, he thought. Who was Evelyn? "Who тАж?"
She reached him. "Evelyn Hodges, who did you think it was? Are you hurt? Has
something gone wrong with your suit? Oh, I knew I should have brought Mak out
here with me. The outside temperature is about ten degrees Fahrenheit right now.
But in fifteen minutes it'll be ninety or more. I can't get you back to the ship by
myself."

"No. No." Rimkin shook his head. "All right. My suit. I'm justтАж"

"What is it then?"