"Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - I'm Going to Meet My Br" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strugatski Arkady)

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky - Molecular Cafe - I'm Going to
Meet My Brother



Vladislav
KRAPIVIN

I'M GOING TO MEET MY BROTHER
Molecular Caf├й Compilation
Mir Publishers Moscow 1968
Translated from the Russian (The translator is not indicated)

___________________________________________________
OCR: http://home.freeuk.com/russica2



Watch for the "Magellan"
I

Whoever has been to Konsata must remember the steep narrow steps down the
cliffs. They start from a colonnade at the top and lead down to the sea. At the
bottom there is just a narrow strip of shore between them and the water. Covered
with porous rocks and shingle, this strip stretches along the yellow-white cliffs from
South Valley right up to the North Point, where the obelisk to dead astronauts
pierces the sky like an inclined needle.
It is a pleasant spot to collect the coloured stones rounded and smoothed by the
waves, and to hunt for the fierce black crabs. The boys from the school whose
grounds lie to the south of Ratal Cosmodrome, always stop here for a while on their
way home. They cram their pockets with treasures whose value adults never have
understood, and never will, and then run up the steep steps, which they prefer to the
escalator that climbs the cliff a hundred yards or so further on.
At the time I'm writing about I had just finished a paper on the third expedition to
the Amazon basin. Now for a whole month I could read the ordinary books I had
missed from pressure of work.
I would take a book of poems, or a collection of Randin's stories, and go to the
top of the Old Steps. The place was deserted. Grass grew between the flag stones
and birds had built nests in the scrolls of the heavy capitals.
At first I was all alone at the colonnade, but later a tall dark man wearing a grey
jacket of strange cut started coming there. To begin with we took no notice of one
another as though by mutual agreement. But as hardly anyone else ever came there,
and we were meeting every day, eventually we began to salute though we never
spoke to one another. I read and the stranger, who seemed to have something on his
mind, was too preoccupied to want to strike up a conversation.
This man always came in the evening. Then the sun hung over North Point,
behind which rose the white buildings of Konsata, the blue of the sea was beginning
to fade, and the waves were taking on a grey metallic hue. To the east the arches of
the old viaduct would be tinted pink by the rays of the evening sun. The viaduct lay
at the end of Ratal Cosmodrome, as a memorial of the days when planetary liners