"Utley, Steven - The Despoblado" - читать интересную книгу автора (Utley Steven)

"Well, that's not very likely to happen, is it? Listen, he's not the only one. There're several more just like him, living off in the badlands with just a radio set and some crates of canned goods and a case of whiskey. That one we visited today, he told me once that man is the ape that lives like a cockroach."

"I guess he's the living proof of that."

"He meant that we tend to pack ourselves together in confined spaces and live in our own dirt, and we eat anything and breed like crazy."

"That man needs professional help."

Walton shrugged again. "Nobody can help him."

"Not here they can't."

"Not back in the twenty-first century, either. Where could he go there, what could he do, to find the kind of isolation and seclusion he wants? Here, at least, he's happy, or content, or whatever the hell he is. You can't get much more secluded and isolated than four hundred million years in the past and way off in the hinterlands."

"He looked at me like I wasЧlike I was I don't know what."

"Like you were just another member of the whole damned human race he came here to get away from. It's nothing personal. There's nothing personal about any of it. I'm not sure he really thinks of himself as a member of our species any more. Somebody who needs isolation that bad must've been born without the ape gene for gregariousness. I'm not sure what he thinks at all, to tell the truth. We may be just symbionts to him. We bring him food and whiskey, he transmits data to us. It's about the same kind of relationship you have with the bacteria in your guts."

"It sounds sociopathic."

"Maybe. It's antisocial at the very least. But maybe sociopaths are really mutants adapted for life off by themselves. Preadapted for life in the unknown places. It's always the loners who're the trailblazers, the first ones to go out into the unknown. Probably wherever the human race goes, out in space to other worlds, back in time, there'll always be some seriously unsocialized character way out ahead on the edge of everything. Maybe men like that are our ace in the hole. Maybe they guarantee the survival of our species."

"Not if they are all men and don't take along girlfriends."

"There're women hermits, too."

"Out here?"

Walton shrugged. "Who knows?"

They said no more for several minutes. Then Michelle made an amused sound. "What do you suppose courtship between a male and a female hermit is like?"

"Maybe like scorpions mating. Hell, I don't know. Maybe hermits aren't our ace in the hole. It's just a hypothesis."

"Well, I've had it up to here with hypotheses. Can a person buy something to drink on this beamy scow?"

"If it's Scotch, and if a person doesn't call this beautiful and versatile craft of mine a beamy scow." He glanced at her sharply. "And I should probably ask to see some identification."

"I turned twenty-five in November."

"Moen was right. You are older than you look."

Walton fetched a bottle and two glasses, and he and Michelle settled into a comfortable silence. After a minute or two, however, he realized that he was unaccountably quite happy, and then after a moment more that he was perhaps not quite so happy after all, that he wanted to say to her and, moreover, that he probably would never dare to say to her, I think I shall miss you terribly when you've gone. He was grateful when Wicket, who had been sitting on a stack of palettes at the bow, reading a book, suddenly got up and came and stood about six feet from Walton and Michelle. Walton looked at him in frank astonishment and murmured, "Well, well." Wicket looked from Walton to a point in space near Michelle and then back at Walton, who told Michelle, "Looks like you've finally been sort of kind of accepted."

She made a visible effort not to look directly at the big man. "I thought he was never going to make up his mind about me."

"Moen distracted him for a bit. He's not crazy about Moen."

"Imagine that."