"Damon Knight - Not with a Bang" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

Like himself, she had found a radio station which still
functioned, and when Smith discovered that she had not
contracted the plague, he agreed to meet her. She was, ap-
parently, naturally immune. There must have been others,
a few at least; but the bombs and the dust had not spared
them.
It seemed very awkward to Louise that not one Protestant
minister was left alive.
The trouble was, she really meant it. It had taken Smith
a long time to believe it, but it was true. She would not sleep
U Y
in the same hotel with him, either; she expected, and re-
ceived, the utmost courtesy and decorum. Smith had
learned his lesson. He walked on the outside of the rubble-
heaped sidewalks; he opened doors for her, when there were
still doors; he held her chair; he reframed from swearing.
He courted her.
Louise was forty or thereabouts, at least five years older
than Smith. He often wondered how old she thought she
was. The shock of seeing whatever it was that had hap-
pened to the hospital, the patients she had cared for, had
sent her mind scuttling back to her childhood. She tacitly
admitted that everyone else in the world was dead, but she
seemed to regard it as something one did not mention,
A hundred times in the last three weeks, Smith had felt
an almost irresistible impulse to break her thin neck and
go his own way. But there was no help for it; she was the
only woman in the world, and he needed her. If she died, or
left him, he died. Old bitchi he thought to himself furiously,
and carefully kept the thought from showing on his face.
"Louise, honey," he told her gently, "I want to spare your
feelings as much as I can. You know that."
"Yes, Rolf," she said, staring at him with the face of a
hypnotized chicken.
Smith forced himself to go on. "We've got to face the
facts, unpleasant as they may be. Honey, we're the only
man and the only woman there are. We're like Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden."
Louise's face took on a slightly disgusted expression. She
was obviously thinking of fig leaves.
"Think of the generations unborn," Smith told her, with a
tremor in his voice. Think about me for once. Maybe you're
good for another ten years, maybe not. Shuddering, he
thought of the second stage of the diseasethe helpless
rigidity, striking without warning. He'd had one such attack
already, and Louise had helped him out of it. Without her,
he would have stayed like that till he died, the hypodermic
that would save him within inches of his rigid hand. He
thought desperately, If 1m lucky, I'll get at least two kids
out of you before you croak. Then I'll be safe.