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

His guide looked at him sharply. "Not like they did. Things glow, but they burn up when we can't keep all the air away from 'em. But you'd be smarter not to ask questions, boy. And maybe you'd be smarter to leave here a little sooner than you planned. Not to be unfriendly, but if you talk to us, you'll talk to others. And we don't much care for talk about Moseby. It has a way of spreading where it shouldn't."
The policeman turned through an open gate and up a graveled pathway. Rosy light leaked around the shutters of a large building on the edge of the Assembly. Sound and warm air bloomed into the night when he opened the door. In the mild weather the anteroom door was open within.
"Carter!" shouted a big man at the bar of the taproom. "Just in time to buy us a round!" Then he saw Smith and blinked, and the dozen or so men of the company grew quieter than the hiss of the fire.
"Friends, I don't bite," said Smith with a smile, "but I do drink and I will sleep. If I can come to an agreement with our host here, that is," he added, beaming toward the barman.
"Modell's the name," said the tall, knob-jointed local. Neither he nor the traveler offered to shake hands, but he returned the other's smile with a briefer, professional one of his own. "Let's see what you have to trade."
The men at the bar made room as Smith arranged his small stock on the mahogany. First the traveler set out an LP record, still sealed in plastic. Modell's lips moved silently as his finger hovered a millimeter above the title. "What's a 'Cher,'?' he finally asked.
"The lady's name," said Smith. "She pronounced it `share.' " Knowing grunts from the men around him chorused the explanation. "You've electricity here, I see. Perhaps there's a phonograph?"
"Naw, and the power's not trained enough yet anyhow," Modell said regretfully. His eyes were full of the jacket photograph. "It heats the smelters is all, and-"
"Modell, you're supposed to be trading, not running your mouth," the policeman interrupted. "Get on with it."
"Well, if not the record, then-" Smith said.
"I might make you an offer on the picture," one of the locals broke in.
"I won't separate them, I'm afraid," Smith rejoined, "and I won't have the record where it can't be used properly. These may be more useful, though I can't guarantee them after the time they've been sitting . . . ." And he laid a red-and-green box of .30-30 cartridges on the wood.
"The chief keeps all the guns in Moseby besides these," said Carter, patting the plastic stock of his M16. "It'll stay that way. And there's a righteous plenty of ammunition for them already."
"Fine, fine," said Smith, unperturbed, reaching again into his pack. He removed a plastic box that whirred until a tiny green hand reached out of the mechanism to shut itself off. It frightened the onlookers as much as Smith's own radiation scars had. The traveler thoughtfully hid the toy again in his pack before taking out his final item, a GI compass.
"It always shows north, unless you're too close to iron," Smith said as he demonstrated. "You can turn the base to any number of degrees and take a sighting through the slot there, but I'll want more than a night's lodging for it."
"Our tokens are good up and down the river," one of the locals suggested, ringing a small brass disk on the bar. It had been struck with a complex pattern of lightning bolts on one side and the number SO on the other. "You can redeem 'em for iron ingots at dockside," he explained, thumbing toward the river. "Course, they discount 'em the farther away you get."
"I don't follow rivers a great deal," the traveler lied with a smile. "Let's say that I get room and board-and all I, care to drink-for a week . . . ."
The chaffering was good-natured and brief, concluding with three days' room and board, or-and- here Smith nodded toward the stern-faced Carter-so much shorter a time as he actually stayed in the village. In addition, Smith would have all the provisions he requested for his journey and a round for the house now. When Modell took the traveler's hand, extended to seal the bargain, the whole room cheered. The demands for mugs of the sharp, potent beer drew the innkeeper when he would far rather have pored over his pre-Blast acquisition-marvelous, though of scant use to him.
The dealing over, Smith carried his mug to one of the stools before the fire. Sausages, dried vegetables, and a
pair of lanterns hung from the roof joists. Deer and elk antlers were pegged to the pine paneling all around the room, and above the mantelpiece glowered the skull of a rat larger than a German shepherd.
"I wonder that a man has the courage to walk alone out there," suggested a heavy-set local who tamped his pipe with the ball of his thumb, "what with the muties and all."
Smith chuckled, swigged his beer, and gestured with the mug at the rat skull. "Like that, you mean? But that's old. The giant rats were nasty enough, I have no doubt, but they weren't any stronger than the wolves, and they were a good deal stupider. Maybe you'd find a colony now and again in ruins downwind of a Strike, but they'll not venture far into the light, and the ones that're left-not many-are nothing that a slingstone or arrow can't cure if needs be." He paused and smiled. "Besides, their meat's sweet enough, I'm told."
Despite the fire, the other faces in the circle went pale. Smith's eyes registered the reaction while he continued to smile. "Now travelers tell stories, you know," he said, "and there's an art to listening to them. There's little enough to joke about on the trail. So I have to do it here."
His face went serious for a moment, and he added, "But I'll tell you this and swear to the truth of it: When I was near what may have been Cleveland, I thought I'd caught a mouse rummaging in my pack. And when I fetched it out, it was no bigger than a mouse, and its legs were folded under it so it could hop and scurry the way a mouse can. But its head-there was a horn just there"-the traveler touched the tip of his nose-"and another littler one just behind it. I figure some zoo keeper before the Blast would have called me a liar if I'd told him what his rhinos would breed to, don't you think?"
He drank deep. The company buzzed at the wonder and
the easy fellowship of the man who had seen it.
"Scottie meant the half-men, didn't you, Scottie?" said a bulky man whose mustache and the beard fringing his mouth were dark with beer. He mimed an extra head with his clenched fist. "Monsters like that in the Hot Lands."
Smith's head bobbed sagely against the chorus of grim assent from the other men. "Sure, I know what you mean," he said. "Two-headed men? Girls with an extra pair of legs coming out of their bellies?"
Sounds of horror and agreement.
"You see," the traveler went on, "the Blast changed things, but you know as well as I do that it didn't change them to be easier for men. There've always been children born as . . . monsters, if you will. Maybe more born nowadays than there were before the Blast, but they were born, and I've seen books that were old at the Blast that talk of them. And they don't live now, my friends. Life everywhere is too hard, and those poor innocents remind folk of the Blast, and who would remember that?"
He looked around the room. The eyes that met his dropped swiftly. "There's been some born here in Moseby, haven't there?" Smith asked, his words thrusting like knife blades and no doubt in them. "Where are they now?"
The man they had called Scottie bit through the reed stem of his pipe. He spluttered, and the front legs of his stool clacked on the puncheon floor.
"Say, now, I'm not here to pry," Smith continued swiftly. "What you do is your own business. For my own part, I'd appreciate another mug of this excellent beer."
Chairs scraped in agreement as all the men stood, stretched, and moved to the bar. Modell drew beer smoothly, chalking drinks on the board on the back wall everyone but Smith was a local. The innkeeper even broached a new cask without noticeable delay. Several of
the company went out by the rear door and returned, lacing their trousers. There was a brief pause as everyone settled back around the fire. Then Scottie swallowed, scowled, and said belligerently, "All right, 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 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 Assembly. Him with a wife and six children, too! Well, don't try to bring one back here with you. They should know better, but if one didn't, it'd be the worse for both of you." The innkeeper blew out one of the lamps and moved toward the other.