"Kate Wilhelm - Scream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

"So I'm not a hydrologist. I'm a pamphlet writer for Health, Education and Welfare."

"I know." She glanced at me again. "But why didn't they send a real hydrologist?"

"Because we don't have one."

She stood up and walked to the window netting and looked out. Her shirt was wet under her sleeves and
down her back, her hair clung to her cheeks and the nape of her neck. "Why?" she whispered. "Why?
Why? Why?"

"If they knew that we wouldn't be here."

She walked back to her chair and sat down again, drawing the microscope toward her once more.

"Is the bay all right?"

"Yes." She adjusted the focus and forgot about me. I left.
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




The warehouse where Trainor had found the boats was half a dozen blocks up the waterfront. I walked
and sweated. Trainor had dragged some small boats outside, and I chose the smallest of them and took it
down to the water. I rowed out into the bay, undressed, and swam for half an hour; then I started to row,
going no place in particular.

The water was marvelously calm, and I felt cooler and less tense after the swim. I stopped to dive a
couple of times around a sunken yacht; it had been stripped. I stopped again, this time ashore at what
looked like a copy of the Parthenon. It had been a museum. The water lapped about the foundation;
marble stairs and massive fountains indicated that it had been a grandiose thing. A statue had toppled and
I considered it. A female form -- vaguely female, anyway. Rounded, curving, voluptuous-looking, roughly
hewn out of granite, it was touching somehow. The eye-hollows were facing out to sea, waiting, watching
the water, waiting. The essence of woman as childbearer, woman as nourisher, woman as man's sexual
necessity. Her flesh would be warm and yielding. She would be passive, accept his seed, and let it come
to life within her. Those great round arms would hold a child, let it suckle at the massive breasts. I wished
I could stand the statue upright again. When it fell one of the arms had broken; it lay apart from the bulk
of the work. I tried to lift it: too heavy. I ran my hand over the rough rock and I wanted to sit on the floor
by the woman and talk to her, cry a little, rest my cheek against that breast. I began to feel suffocated
suddenly and I turned and ran from the museum without looking for anything else. The sun was setting,
the sky crimson and blue and green, incredible colors that looked like cheap art.

It was dark when I got back to headquarters. All the others were there already, even Trainor. Delia was
cooking. I watched her as she added water to the dehydrated stew and stirred it over canned heat. She
was angular, with firm muscles and hardly any breasts at all. Her hips were slim, boyish, her legs all
muscle and bone. I wondered again about her sexuality. I had seen her studying Trainor speculatively
once, but nothing had come of it, and I had seen almost the same expression on her face a time or two
when she had been looking at Corrie.

I turned my attention to Corrie -- a little better, but still not really woman, not as the statue had signified