"Mike Resnick - A Princess of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

every table and counter and shelf in the house.

I had no desire to be with other people, so I spent most of my days catching
up on my reading. Well, let me amend that. I started a lot of books; I
finished almost none of them. It was the same thing with movies: I'd rent a
few, begin playing them, and usually turn them off within fifteen or twenty
minutes. Friends would invite me out, I'd refuse, and after awhile they
stopped calling. I barely noticed.




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Winter came, a seemingly endless series of bleak days and frigid nights. It
was the first time since I'd married Lisa that I didn't bring a Christmas tree
home to decorate. There just didn't seem much sense to it. We'd never had any
children, she wasn't there to share it, and I wasn't going to have any
visitors.

As it turned out, I was wrong about the visitor: I spotted him maybe an hour
before midnight, wandering naked across my backyard during the worst blizzard
of the season.

At first I thought I was hallucinating. Five inches of snow had fallen, and
the wind chill was something like ten below zero. I stared in disbelief for a
full minute, and when he didn't disappear, I put on my coat, climbed into my
boots, grabbed a blanket, and rushed outside. When I reached him he seemed
half frozen. I threw the blanket around him and led him back into the house.

I rubbed his arms and legs vigorously with a towel, then sat him down in the
kitchen and poured him some hot coffee. It took him a few minutes to stop
shivering, but finally he reached out for the cup. He warmed his hands on it,
then lifted it and took a sip.

"Thank you, he whispered hoarsely.

Once I was sure he wasn't going to die, I stood back and took a look at him.
He was actually pretty good-looking now that his color was returning. He might
have been thirty, maybe a couple of years older. Lean body, dark hair, gray
eyes. A couple of scars, but I couldn't tell what they were from, or how fresh
they were. They could have been from one of the wars in Iraq, or old sports
injuries, or perhaps just the wind whipping frozen bushes against him a few
minutes ago.

"Are you feeling better? I asked.

He nodded. Yes, I'll be all right soon."

"What the hell were you doing out there without any clothes on?"