"David Drake - Men Like Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Drake David)
MEN LIKE US
By David Drake
There was a toad crucified against them at the head of the pass. Decades of cooking in the blue haze from the east had left it withered but incorruptible. It remained, even now that the haze was only a memory. The three travelers squatted down before the talisman and stared back at it.
"The village can't be far from here," Smith said at last. "I'll go down tomorrow."
Ssu-ma shrugged and argued, "Why waste time? We can all go down together."
"Time we've got," said Kozinski, playing absently with his ribs as he eyed the toad. "A lot of the stories we've been told come from ignorance, from fear. There may be no more truth to this one than to many of the others. We have a duty, but we have a duty as well not to disrupt needlessly. We'll wait for you and watch."
Smith chuckled wryly. "What sort of men would there be in the world," he said, "if it weren't for men like us?"
All three of them laughed, but no one bothered to finish
their old joke.
The trail was steep and narrow. The stream was now bubbling ten meters below, but in springtime it would fill its sharp gorge with a torrent as cold as the snows that spawned it. Coming down the valley, Smith had a good view of Moseby when he had eased around the last facet of rock above the town. It sprawled in the angle of the creek and the river into which the creek plunged. In a niche across the creek from the houses was a broad stone building, lighted by slit windows at second-story level. Its only entrance was an armored door. The building could have been a prison or a fortress were it not for the power lines running from it, mostly to the smelter at the riverside. A plume of vapor overhung its slate roof.
One of the pair of guards at the door of the power plant was morosely surveying the opposite side of the gorge for want of anything better to do. He was the first to notice Smith. His jaw dropped. The traveler waved to him. The guard blurted something to his companion and threw a switch beside the door.
What happened then frightened Smith as he thought nothing in the world could frighten him again: An air raid siren on the roof of the power plant sounded, rising into a wail that shook echoes from the gorge. Men and women darted into the streets, some of them armed, but Smith did not see the people, these people, and he did not fear anything they could do to him.
Then the traveler's mind was back in the present, a smile on his face and nothing in his hands but an oak staff worn by the miles of earth and rock it had butted against. He continued down into the village, past the fences and latrines of the nearest of the houses. Men with crossbows met him there, but they did not touch him, only motioned the traveler onward. The rest of the townsfolk gathered in
an open area in the center of the town. It separated the detached houses on the east side from the row of flimsier structures built along the river. The latter obviously served as barracks, taverns, and brothels for bargees and smelter workers. The row buildings had no windows facing east, and even their latrines must have been dug on the riverside. A few people joined the crowd from them and from the smelter itself, but only a few.
"That's close enough," said the foremost of those awaiting the traveler. The local was a big man with a 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 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.
"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 being liquefied. "Yes, I burned it," the traveler said evenly, "getting too close to something the-something the Blast was too close to. And it'll never heal, no. But it hasn't gotten worse, either, and that was years ago. It's not the sort of world where I could complain to have lost so little, hey?"
"Put it down," the chief said abruptly. Then, to the guard who was searching the pack. "Weapons?"
"Only this," the guard said, holding up a sling and a dozen dense pebbles fitted to its leather pocket.
"There's a little folding knife in my pants pocket." Smith volunteered. "I use it to skin the rabbits I take."
"Then put your clothes on," the chief ordered, and the crowd's breath eased. "You can stay at the inn, since you've truck enough to pay for it"-he nodded toward the careful pile the guard had made of Smith's trading goods-"and perhaps you can find girls on Front Street to service you as well. There's none of that east of the Assembly here, I warn you. Before you do anything else,
though, you talk to me and the boys in private at the station."
The traveler nodded and began dressing without embarrassment.
The police and their guards escorted Smith silently, acting as if they were still uncertain of his status. Their destination was a two-story building of native stone. It had probably been the town hall before the Blast. It was now the chiefs residence as well as the government's headquarters. Despite that, the building was far less comfortable than many of the newer structures that had been designed to be heated by the stoves and lighted by lamps and windows. In an office whose plywood paneling had been carefully preserved-despite its shoddy gloominess-the governing oligarchs of the town questioned Smith.
They were probing and businesslike. Smith answered honestly and as fully as he could. Weapons caches? Looted by survivors or rotted in the intervening centuries. Food depots? A myth, seeded by memories of supermarkets and brought to flower in the decades of famine and cold that slew ten times as many folk as the Blast had slain directly. Scrap metal for the furnaces? By the millions of tons, but there would be no way to transport it across the mountains. And, besides, metals were often hot even at this remove from the Blast.
"All right," said the chief at last, shutting the handbook of waxed boards on which he had been making notes. The room had become chilly about the time they had had to light the sooty naphtha lamp. "If we think of more during the night, we can ask in the morning." His eyes narrowed. "How long are you expecting to stay?"
Smith shrugged. "A few days. I just like to . . . wander. I really don't have any desire to do anything else." He raised his pack by the straps and added, "Can one of you
direct me to your inn?"
Carter, the youngest of the six policemen, stood. He was a blocky man with black hair and a pepper-and-salt beard. He had conducted much of the questioning himself. "I'll take him," he said. Unlike his colleagues, he carried a heavy fighting knife in addition to his automatic rifle. He held the door open for Smith.
The night sky was patchy. When the silver moon was clear, there was more light outside than the bud of naphtha cast within. The pall of steam above the power plant bulged and waned like the mantle of an octopus. Tiny azure sparks traced the power lines across the bridge and down into the smelter.
Smith thumbed at the plant. "They made light from electricity, you know? Before the Blast. You ever try that?"
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