"Gordon R. Dickson - Time Storm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

good reason to me to get out, if I was someone living here."
lie shook his head.
"Not everybody," he said, "Not without leaving some kind of message."
I gave up. If he did not want reasonable explanations, there was no point in my forcing them on
him.
TeQ me," be said, after we had sat there without talking for a while, "do you think God had
something to dowithitr
So mat was his hang-up. That was why he stayed here, day after day, defending a town with no
people in it That was why he had carefully adapted the well in the basement to the new conditions


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and set up a wood stove so dial he could give a regular meal at a moment's notice to a complete
family, if they should return unexpectedly, showing op at the front door, tired and hungry. I
wanted to tell him neither God nor human had ever changed tilings much for me; but now that I knew
what his question meant to him, I could not do it All at once I felt the pain in himтАФand I found
myself suddenly angry that someone I did not even know should be able to export his troubles to
me, like that It was true I had lost no**"i>gj not Mice him. Still....
"Who can tell?" I said, standing up. "We'd better be going."
He stood up also, quickly. Before he was on his feet, Sunday was on his, and that brought the girl
scrambling upright
"You could stay here overnight,'* he said.
I shook my head.
"You don't want to drive in the dark," he went on.
TIME STORM 17 T **No," I said. "But I'd like to get some mfles under our belt before
quitting for the day. I'm anxious to get to my wife."
I led the leopard and the girl out to the panel, which I bad driven over and now stood in his
driveway. I opened the door on the driver's side, and the other two got in, crawling back into the
body. I waited until they were settled, then got in myself and was about to back out, when
Samuelson, who had gone in the house instead of following us to the truck, came out again, almost
shyly, with a pair of large paper grocery sacks. He pushed them in through the open window at my
left.
"Here," he said. There's some food you could use. I put in a bottle of the wine, too."
Thanks." I put the two sacks on the empty front seat beside me. He looked past me, back into the
body of the van, where the girl and the leopard were already curled up, ready for sleep.
*Tve got everything, you know," he said. "Everything you could want There's nothing she could
useтАФclothes, or anything?"
"Sunday's the only thing she wants," I said. "As long as she's got him, there's nothing eke she
cares about"
"Well, goodby then," he said.
"So long."
I backed out into the street and drove off. In the side-view mirror I could see him walk into the
street himself so that he could look after us and wave. I turned a corner two blocks down and the
houses shut him from view.
He had given me a filling station map earner, with a route marked in pencil, that led me to the
south edge of the city and out at last on a two-lane asphalt road rising and dipping over the
land, with open, farmers* fields on either side. The fields had all been planted that spring; and
as I drove along I was surrounded by acres of corn and wheat and peas no one would ever harvest or