"Kate Wilhelm - Baby, You Were Great" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

of you at a party, you wouldn't think anything of it. What difference if I did it this way? I knew you'd
like each other. He's bright, like you, likes the same sort of things you do. Comes from a poor family,
like yours тАж Everything said you'd get along тАж"

"Oh, yes," she said almost absently. "We get along." She was feeling in her hair, her fingers searching
for the scars.

"It's all healed by now," John said. She looked at him as if she had forgotten he was there.

"I'll find a surgeon," she said, standing up, her fingers white on her glass. "A brain surgeon тАж"

"It's a new process," John said slowly. "It would be dangerous to go in after them тАж"

She looked at him for a long time. "Dangerous?"

He nodded.

"You could take it back out тАж"

He remembered the beginning, how he had quieted her fear of the electrodes and the wires. Her fear was
that of a child for the unknown and the unknowable. Time and again he had proven to her that she could
trust him, that he wouldn't lie to her. He hadn't lied to her, then. There was the same trust in her eyes, the
same unshakable faith. She would believe him. She would accept without question whatever he said.
Herb had called him an icicle, but that was wrong. An icicle would have melted in her fires. More like a
stalactite, shaped by centuries of civilization, layer by layer he had been formed until he had forgotten
how to bend, forgotten how to find release for the stirrings he felt somewhere in the hollow, rigid core of
himself. She had tried and, frustrated, she had turned from him, hurt, but unable not to trust one she had
loved. Now she waited. He could free her, and lose her again, this time irrevocably. Or he could hold her

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as long as she lived.

Her lovely gray eyes were shadowed with fear and the trust that he had given to her. Slowly he shook his
head.

"I can't," he said. "No one can."

"I see," she murmured, the black filling her eyes. "I'd die, wouldn't I? Then you'd have a lovely
sequence, wouldn't you, Herb?" She swung around, away from John. "You'd have to fake the story line,
of course, but you are so good at that. An accident, emergency brain surgery needed, everything I feel
going out to the poor little drabs who never will have brain surgery done. It's very good," she said
admiringly. Her eyes were very black. "In fact, anything I do from now on, you'll use, won't you? If I
kill you, that will simply be material for your editors to pick over. Trial, prison, very dramatic тАж On the
other hand, if I kill myself тАж"

John felt chilled; a cold, hard weight seemed to be filling him. Herb laughed. "The story line will be
something like this," he said. "Anne has fallen in love with a stranger, deeply, sincerely in love with
him. Everyone knows how deep that love is; they've all felt it, too, you know. She finds him raping a