"Andre Norton - Daybreak - 2250 A. D." - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

directly before him. And luck was favoring him as it never had before for the heavy shutter was
not bolted or even completely closed as his exploring fingers discovered. After allтАФno one had
ever dreamed of invading the Star Hall unasked.

Moving as noiselessly as Lura he swung over the high sill and stood breathing in a sort of light
flutter. To the ordinary man of the Eyrie the room would have been almost pitch dark. But, for
once, Fors' mutant night sight was an aid. He could see the long table, the benches, without
difficulty, make out the line of pouches hanging on the far wall. These were his goal. His hand
closed unerringly on one he had helped to pack many times. But when he lifted it from its hook he
detached the gleaming bit of metal pinned to its strap.

To his father's papers and belongings he might prove some shadowy claim. But to that Star he had
no right. His lips twisted in a bitter grimace as he laid the badge down on the edge of the long
table before clambering back into the grayness of the outer world.

Now that the pouch swung from his shoulder he went openly to the storage house and selected a
light blanket, a hunter's canteen and a bag of traveler's corn kept in readiness there. Then,
reclaiming his weapons and the impatient Lura, he started offтАФnot toward the narrow mountain
valleys where all of his hunting had been done, but down toward the forbidden plains. A chill bom
of excitement rather than the bite of the rising wind roughened his skin, but his step was sure
and confident as he hunted out the path blazed by Langdon more than ten years before, a path which
was not overlooked by any station of the outpost guards.

Many times around the evening fires had the men of the Eyrie discussed the plains below and the
strange world which had felt the force of the Great Blow-up and been turned into an alien,
poisonous trap for any human not knowing its ways. Why, in the past twenty years even the Star Men
had mapped only four cities, and one of those was "blue" and so must be avoided.

They knew the traditions of the old times. But, Langdon had always insisted even while he was
repeating the stories to Fors, they could not judge how much of this information had been warped
and distorted by time. How could they be sure that they were of the same race as those who had
lived before the Blow-up? The radiation sickness, which had cut the number of survivors in the
Eyrie to less than half two years after the war, might well have altered the future generations.
Certainly the misshapen Beast Things must once have had a human origin though that was difficult
for any who saw them now to believe. But they clung to the old cities and there the worst of the
change took place.

The men of the Eyrie had records to prove that their forefathers had been a small band of
technicians and scientists engaged in some secret research, cut off from a world which disappeared
so quickly. But there were the Plainsmen of the wide grasslands, also free from the taint of the
beast, who had survived and now roamed with their herds.

And there might be others.

Who had started the atomic war was unknown. Fors had once seen an old book containing jotted
fragments of messages which had come out of the air through machines during a single horrible day.
And these broken messages only babbled of the death of a world.

But that was all the men of the mountains knew of the last war. And while they fought ceaselessly
to keep alive the old skills and learning there was so much, so very much, they no longer