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

what about the Changelings?"
"Pardon?" The traveler's eyes were friendly above the rim of his mug, but there was no comprehension in
them.
"Oh, come on!" the local said, flushing in embarrassment. "You know about the Changelings. Everybody
does. The Blast made them. They were men before, but now they glow blue and change their shapes and
walk around like skeletons, all bones!" Scottie lowered his eyes and slurped his beer in the silence. At
last he repeated. "Everybody knows."
Gently, as if the suggestion did not appear as absurd to him as it suddenly did to everyone else in the
room, Smith said, "I've seen some of the Strike Zones. I guess I've said that. There's nothing there,
friend. The destruction is total, everything. It isn't likely that anything was created by the Blast."
"The Blast changed things. We can all agree there," said Carter unexpectedly. Eyes turned toward the
policeman seated at one corner of the heart. "Random change," Carter continued to muse aloud. "That'll
generally mean destruction, yes. But there was a lot of power in the bombs, and a lot of bombs. So much
power that . . .
Who knows what they could have done?"
Smith looked at the policeman. He nodded again. "Power, yes. But the chance that the changes, cell by
cell, atom by atom, would be . . . not destructive. That's a billion to one against, Mr. Carter."
"Well, the books say there were billions of men in the world before the Blast," the policeman said,
spreading the fingers of his left hand, palm upward.
The traveler's scarred left hand mirrored the policeman's. "It's a wide world," he said, "as you must know
and I surely do." He drank, smiled again, and said, "You're familiar with bombs, it would seem, friend.
I've heard talk in my travels that there was a stockpile of bombs in the mountains around here. Do you
know that story?"
Carter looked at Smith with an expression that was terrible in its stillness. "Modell," he said in the silence,
"it's time to throw another log on the fire." He paused. The innkeeper scurried to do as directed. "And it's
time," the policeman continued, "to talk of other things than the Blast. What sort of game do you find in
the Hot Lands, for instance?"
"Well, I snare more than I knock on the head with my sling." Smith began easily, and the room relaxed a
little.
They talked and drank late into the night. Smith told of gnarly woods and of following miles of trails worn
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no higher than a hog's shoulder. The locals replied with tales of their farms in the river bottoms, managed
for them by hirelings, and the wealth they drew from shares in the smelter's profits. Few of them actually
did any of the heavy, dangerous work of steel production themselves. Moseby was a feudal state, but its
basis was the power plant, not land.
When Carter finally left, only Scottie and another local remained in company with Smith and Modell, and
the talk grew looser. Finally Scottie wheezed, "They drift in here to Moseby, up the river and down.
You're the first across the mountains, boy, I'll tell the world. We put 'em to work in the fields or the
smelter, or they crew the barges for us. But they're not Moseby; they're not the Assembly. It's us who've
got the power, under the chief and the police, that is. We keep the Light, and then-"
Modell touched the line of Scottie's jaw, silencing him. Scottie's surprise bloomed into awakened fright.
"You've had enough tonight, old man," the innkeeper said. "Pook, you, too. Time for you both to get
home and for me to get to bed."
"And me," Smith agreed. Modell had already brought out blankets and opened a side bench into a cot.
"Though, first I'll take a leak and, say, a walk to settle my head. If you leave the door on the latch?"
Modell nodded dourly. "You've been listening to that fool Howes and his talk of the girls across the