"George R. R. Martin - WC 1 - Wild Cards" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

"Ohl I-who?"
"It's me, Belinda," he said. "Robert."
"Robert?"
"Bobby, Bobby Tomlin."
She stared at him a moment, her hands clasped over her front though she was
fully dressed.
"Oh, Bobby," she said, and came to him and hugged him and gave him a big kiss
right on the mouth.



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It was what he had waited six years for.
"Bobby. It's great to see you. I-I was expecting someone else. Some-girlfriends.
How did you find me?"
"Well, it wasn't easy"
She stepped back from him. "Let me look at you." He looked at her. The last time
he had seen her she was fourteen, a tomboy, still at the orphanage. She had been
a thin kid with mousy blond hair. Once, when she was eleven, she'd almost
punched his lights out. She was a year older than he. Then he had gone away, to
work at the airfield, then to fight with the Brits against Hitler. He had
written her when he could all during the war, after America entered it. She had
left the orphanage and been put in a foster home. In '44 one of his letters had
come back from there marked 'Moved-No Forwarding Address.' Then he had been lost
all during the last year.. "You've changed, too," he said.
"So have you."
"Uh."
"I followed the newspapers all during the war. I tried to write you but I don't
guess the letters ever caught up with you. Then they said you were missing at
sea, and I sort of gave up."
"Well, I was, but they found me. Now I'm back. How have you been?"
"Real good, once I ran away from the foster home," she said. A look of pain came
across her face. "You don't know how glad I was to get away from there. Oh,
Bobby," she said. "Oh, I wish things was different!" She started to cry a
little.
"Hey," he said, holding her by the shoulders. "Sit down. I've got something for
you."
"A present?"
"Yep." He handed her a grimy, oil-stained paper parcel. "I carried these with me
the last two years of the war. They were in the plane with me on the island.
Sorry I didn't have time to rewrap them."
She tore the English butcher paper. Inside were copies of The House at Pooh
Corner and The Tale of the Fierce Bad Rabbit.
"Oh," said Belinda. "Thank you."
He remembered her dressed in the orphanage coveralls, just in, dusty and tired
from a baseball game, lying on the reading-room floor with a Pooh book open
before her.
"The Pooh book's signed by the real Christopher Robin," he said. "I found out he