"Tom Easton - Mood Wendigo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

freight," "take yon train," and more, though those were clearest. I wondered what madman he was
holding here. And then we faced the last cell in the row. Through the bars, I made out a form strapped
onto the narrow bunk, head tossing, face bruised and scratched, denim and wool clothes torn and soiled.
It was Lydia.

The Chief spoke. "We picked her up like that yesterday afternoon. She walked into town, went straight
to the school, and tried to get into her classroom, raving all the time, just like this. The substitute called
the principal, and he called us. I'm waiting for the judge to sign the papers now, and then one of the men'll
drive her to Augusta."

AMHI. The Augusta Mental Health Institute. Where they would try to bring her back, perhaps with
drugs and electric shocks. But what else could anyone do? I turned away.

Back in the Chief's office, I remembered Lydia's camera. Did he have it? He did, along with everything
that had been in her pockets. "Then perhaps," I said, "it might be a good idea to have the film developed.
She could have got her pictures after all, and they could help the doctors understand what's wrong with
her now."

"Of course," he said, and I left. I wanted sleep, but I should return the gear Lydia had borrowed first and
tell Keith's family what had happened. Then, maybe, I could begin to puzzle over how Lydia had
disappeared last night and reappeared yesterday. Time travel was impossible, wasn't it?

The Hutchisons and Jacksons were enraged. With me, with Lydia, with the town, with the school. One
boy lost, another ill, but the lost one most on their minds. Jack Hutchison swore he would run against me
come the next election, sue me for every penny I had, have Lydia fired if she ever regained her wits. But
the prospect of no longer being mayor didn't bother me -- after all, it didn't pay -- and the trip had
officially been a school field trip, and the school had insurance to cover lawsuits.

And then that fuss died down. The pictures came out. Lydia had her wendigo, twice. One shot showed a
line of shiny boxes stretching down a gleaming tunnel. The other showed Keith walking away from the
camera, hand in hand with a figure that wasn't human, through a vast cavern of a room. The shiny boxes
covered the floor of that room, and they were surrounded by machines that bore vague resemblances to
freight dollies and forklift trucks.

I could guess what the wendigo really was. An interstellar freight train, its tracks looping close to Earth at
certain times and places, a freight that could be hopped by anyone who got too close to its passing field.
"Fetal"? Maybe "ftl," faster than light. By "take yon" had she meant "tachyon"? I read enough to know
what that was, how it might fit, and Keith was alive and well, Earth's envoy to other worlds. Lydia, on the
other hand, had been sent back on the next train, going faster than light, backward in time just enough to
get her home a day before she left.

By the time Lydia stopped raving and returned to her job, Pork Hill could no longer be visited, either by
deer poachers or by would-be interstellar hobos. The army had taken it over, and it was now ringed by
wire fence and armed guards while the experts tried to find a way to flag some passing train down.

I don't know if they'll succeed. Lydia can't tell us anything, since she now seems to have no memory of
her journey, and if it weren't for that last picture of Keith I'd be tempted to compare us to the moose. For
years, the rutting bulls would answer train whistles by charging down the tracks into the engine. To the
bull moose, it seems, the whistles sounded like the cry of a cow in heat, and they never learned the
difference. The slaughter only stopped when the companies changed the note of the whistles.