"Mercedes Lackey - To Dye For" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lackey Mercedes)

To Dye For
Mercedes Lackey
Tom Stone was lying flat on his back in the long grass in front of the geodesic dome, staring up at
the sky when Mike Stearns and Doc Nichols showed up for the grassтАФas in, smokable grassтАФhe'd
promised them.
They arrived with a horse and cart, and one of the German boys driving; Tom had heard them
coming for quite a while, but in his current state of flat-lined depression, it hadn't seemed important
enough to get up just to greet them on his feet.
"Hey, Stoner!" Stearns called, when the hoofbeats and the creaking of the cart were getting pretty
close. "Are you dead?"
Tom sighed gustily. "No," he admitted. "Catastrophically crushed, yes. Defeated, depressed, and
debilitated. Out-of-time, out-of-luck, down-and-out. Bewitched, bothered, bereft and bewildered. But
not dead."
He levered himself up out of the grass with an effort, for depression made his middle-aged body
seem all the heavier, and clambered to his feet, while Stearns and the Doc watched him curiously. "Have
you been sampling the product?" Stearns asked, finally.
He sighed again. "Would that I had, but not even a monster doobie, not even a full-filled bong of my
patented West Virginia Wildwood Weed is going to make me forget my sorrows. I'd run off to join the
Foreign Legion, but it hasn't been invented yet."
He took refuge from heartbreak in flippancy. What else could a man do, when he found the love of
his life and lost her to something so stupid as money?
Doc Nichols looked completely blank, but a sudden expression of understanding crept across
Mike's face. "Magdalena?" he asked.
Tom groaned; it was heartfelt. "Magdalena. Or rather, Herr Karl Jurgen Edelmann, whose
considered opinion it is that I am no proper husband for his daughter."
"Ach, vell," said the German boy still on the seat of the wagon, "You aren't."
Tom gave him the hairy eyeball; bad enough that his feelings were exposed for all to see, but this
commentary from the peanut gallery was adding insult to a mortal wound. "I resemble that remark,
Klaus," he retorted bitterly.
"Vell, you aren't, Stoner," the boy persisted. "Vat haf you for to keep a guildmaster's daughter
vith?"
"I am monarch of all I survey," Tom said sourly, opening his arms wide to include the geodesic
dome he and the boys called home, laboriously built circa 1973 out of hand-hammered car hoods and
scavenged windows by the founding members of Lothlorien Commune. The gesture swept in the two tiny
camping trailers that had been added about 1976, the barn and now-derelict shotgun house that had
been the original buildings on this property, and the greenhouse that Tom had made out of more salvaged
windows.
"Und Magdalena vould haf better prospects elsevere," Klaus countered, stolidly. "You haf no
income, Stoner. Effen der Veed, you gifs to der Doc."
Since Tom had heard all that already from the mouth of his beloved Magdalena's father, he wasn't in
a mood to hear it again. "I am not," he growled, "Going to make a profit off of other people's pain."
Klaus only shrugged, though Doc Nichols looked sympathetic. "Dat earns you a place in Heaffen,
maybe," the boy said with oxlike practicality. "But on Earth, no income."
It was an argument Tom had no hope of winning, and he didn't try. Instead, he turned back to
Stearns, changing the subject to one less painful. "The stuff I was going to sell before the Ring hit us was
already bagged, and I've added everything I could harvest without hurting the next crop, Mike," he said,
feeling his shoulders sagging with defeat. "Come on, give me a hand with it."
Stearns and Doc left Klaus with the wagon and followed Tom to the processing "plant" in the barn.
Tom was Grantville's token holdover hippy, the last holdout of a commune that had been founded in
1965 by college dropouts long on idealism and short on practical skillsтАФwhich basically described