"The Pyramid In The Desert" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

She was not singing in the living room, or cooking at the stove, or washing dishes at the sink. Helen was not in the apartment.

She was not visiting any of her friendsТ houses. The hospitals had no one of her description in their accident wards. The police had mot found her body on any slab of the city morgue.

Helen Berent was missing.

In the corner cages the guinea pigs whistled and chirred for food, and the rabbits snuffled and tried to shove their pink noses through the grill. They looked gaunt. He fed them and refilled their water bottles automatically.

There was something different about the laboratory. It was not the way he had left it. Naturally after five months of the stupendous deserts and mountains of Tibet any room seemed small and cramped and artificial, but there were other changes. The cot had been dragged away from the wall, towards the icebox. Beside the cot was a wastebasket and a small table that used to be in the living room. On top of the table were the telephone and the dictation recorder surrounded by hypodermics, small bottles cryptically labeled with a red pencil scrawl, and an alcohol jar with its swab of cotton still in it. Alec touched the cotton. It was dusty to his fingers, and completely dry.

The dictation recorder and the telephone had been oddly linked into one circuit with a timer clock, but the connections were open, and when he picked up the receiver the telephone buzzed as it should.

Alec replaced the receiver and somberly considered the number of things that could be reached by a woman lying down. She could easily spend days there. Even the lower drawers of the filing cabinet were within reach.

He found what he was looking for in the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet, filed under УA,Ф a special folder marked УALEC.Ф In it were a letter and two voice records dated and filed in order.

The letter was dated the day he had left, four months ago. He held it in his hand a minute before beginning to read.

Dear Alec,

You never guessed how silly I felt with my foot in that idiotic bandage. You were so considerate I didnТt know whether to laugh or to cry. After you got on board I heard the plane officials paging a tardy passenger. I knew his place was empty, and it took all my will power to keep from running up the walk into the plane. If I had yielded to the temptation, I would be on the plane with you now, sitting in that vacant seat, looking down at the cool blue Atlantic, and in a month hiking across those windy horizons to the diggings.

But I canТt give up all my lovely plans, so I sublimated the impulse to confess by promising myself to write this letter, and then made myself watch the plane take off with the proper attitude of sad resignation, like a dutiful wife with a hurt foot.

This is the confession. The bandage was a fake. My foot is all right. I just pretended to be too lame to hike to have an excuse to stay home this summer. Nothing else would have made you leave without me.

New York seems twice as hot and sticky now that the plane has taken you away. Honestly, I love you and my vacations too much to abandon the expedition to the unsanitary horrors of native cooking for just laziness. Remember, Alec, once when I was swearing at the gnats along the Whangpo, you quoth, УI could not love you so my dear, loved I not science more.Ф I put salt in your coffee for that, but you were right. I am the wife of an archeologist. Whither thou goest I must go, your worries are my worries, your job, my job.

What you forget is that besides being your wife, I am an endocrinologist, and an expert. If you can cheerfully expose me to cliffs, swamps, man-eating tigers and malarial mosquitoes, all in the name of Archeology, I have an even better right to stick hypodermics in myself in the name of Endocrinology.

You know my experiments in cell metabolism. Well naturally the next step in the investigation is to try something on myself to see how it works. But for ten years, ever since you caught me with that hypodermic and threw such a fit, I have given up the personal guinea pig habit so as to save you worry. Mosquitoes can beat hypos any day, but there is no use trying to argue with a husband.

So I pretended to have broken one of the small phalanges of my foot instead. Much simpler.

I am writing this letter in the upstairs lobby of the Paramount, whither I escaped from the heat. I will write other letters every so often to help you keep up with the experiment, but right now I am going in to see this movie and have a fine time weeping over Joan CrawfordТs phony troubles, then home and to work.

GТby darling. Remember your airsick tablets, and donТt fall out.

Yours always,

Helen

P.S. DonТt eat anything the cook doesnТt eat first. And have a good time.

After the letter there were just two voice records in envelopes. The oldest was dated July 24th. Alec put it on the turntable and switched on the play-back arm. For a moment the machine made no sound but the faint scratching of the needle, and then Helen spoke, sounding close to the microphone, her voice warm and lazy.

УHello, Alec. The day after writing that first letter, while I was looking for a stamp, I suddenly decided not to mail it. There is no use worrying you with my experiment until it is finished. I resolved to write daily letters and save them for you to read all together when you get home.

УOf course, after making that good resolution I didnТt write anything for a month but the bare clinical record of symptoms, injections and reactions.