"David Drake - Men Like Us (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)

pink scalp. It shone through the long wisps of white hair that he brushed carefully back over it. His jacket
and trousers were of wool, dyed blue so that they nearly matched the shirt of ancient polyester he wore
underneath. "Where have you come from?"
"Just about everywhere, one time or another," Smith answered with an engaging grin. "Dubuque,
originally, but that was a long time ago."
"Don't play games with the chief," hissed a somewhat younger man with a cruel face and a similar
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uniform. "You came over the mountains, and nobody comes from the Hot Lands."
Chief of police, Smith marveled as he connected the title and the shirts now worn as regalia. Aloud he
said, "When's the last time anybody from here walked over the mountains? Ever?"
Bearded faces went hard. The traveler continued, "A hundred years ago, two hundred. It was too hot for
you to go anywhere that side of the hills, but not now. Maybe I'll never sire children of my own, but I
never needed that. I needed to see the world, and I have done that, friends."
"Strip him," the chief said flatly.
Smith did not wait for the grim-looking men to force him. He shrugged off his pack and handed it to the
nearest of the guards armed with crossbows and hand-forged swords. He said, "Gently with it, friend.
There's some of it that's fragile, and I need it to trade for room and board the next while." He began to
unhook his leather vest.
Six of the men besides the chief wore the remnants of police uniforms over their jackets. They were all
older-not lean warriors like the crossbowmen-but they carried firearms. Five of them had M16 rifles. The
anodized finish of the receivers had been polished down to the aluminum by ages of diligent ignorance.
The sixth man had a disposable rocket launcher, certain proof that the villagers here had at some time
looted an army base-or a guardroom.
"Just a boy from the Midwest," Smith continued pleasantly, pulling out the tails of his woolen shirt. "I
wanted to see New York City, can you believe that? But we'll none of live forever, will we?"
He laid the shirt, folded from habit, on his vest and began unlacing his boots of caribou leather. "There's a
crater there now, and the waves still glow blue if there's even an overcast to dim the sun. And your skin
prickles."
The traveler grinned. "You won't go there, and I won't go there again, but I've seen it, where the
observation deck of the World Trade Towers was just about the closest mortal man got to heaven with
his feet on man's earth . . . ."
"We've heard the stories," the chief grunted. He carried a stainless-steel revolver in a holster of more
recent vintage.
"Trousers?" Smith asked, cocking an eyebrow at the women in dull-colored dresses.
The chief nodded curtly. "When a man comes from the Hot Lands, he has no secrets from us," he said.
"Any of us."
"Well, I might do the same in your case," the traveler
agreed, tugging loose the laces closing the woolen trousers, "but I can tell you there's little enough truth to
the rumors of what walks the wastelands." He pulled the garment down and stepped out of it.
Smith's body was wiry, the muscles tight and thickly covered by hair. If he was unusual at all, it was in
that he had been circumcised-no longer a common operation in a world that had better uses for a
surgeon's time. Then a woman noticed Smith's left palm, never hidden but somehow never clearly seen
until that moment. She screamed and pointed. Others leveled their weapons, buzzing as a hive does when
a bear nears it.
Very carefully, his face as blank as the leather of his pack, Smith held his left hand toward the crowd and
spread his fingers. Ridges of gnarled flesh stood out as if they had been paraffin refrozen a moment after