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

"If it wasn't the plague, what?"

"I said to let it drop."

"What was it, Bernard? You're crazy, you know that? You're talking crazy."

"Yeah, I'm crazy." He was looking westward again. During the night I wakened to hear him walking back
and forth. I hoped that if he decided to start that night, he'd leave me the canoe. I went back to sleep. He
was still there in the morning.

"Look, Sax, you go back. I'll come along in a day or two."

"Bernard, you can't live off nothing. There won't be any food after tomorrow. We'll both go back, stock
up, and come out again. I couldn't go off and leave you. How would you get back?"

"When I was a boy," he said, "my father and mother were rather famous photographers. They taught me.
We traveled all over the world. Getting pictures of all the vanishing species, for one last glorious book." I
nodded. They had produced two of the most beautiful books I had ever seen. "Then something
happened," he said, after a slight hesitation. "You know all about that, I guess. Your department. They
went away and left me in Mexico. I wasn't a kid, you see, but I'd always been with them. Then I wasn't
with them anymore. No note. No letter. Nothing. They searched for them, of course. Rich gringos aren't
-- weren't -- allowed to simply vanish. Nothing. Before that my father had taken me into the hills, for a
hunt. This time with guns. We shot -- God, we shot everything that moved! Deer. Rabbits. Birds. A
couple of snakes. There was a troop of monkeys. I remember them most of all. Seven monkeys. He
took the left side and I took the right and we wiped them out. Just like that. They shrieked and screamed
and tried to run away, and tried to shield each other, and we got every last one. Then we went back to
my mother and the next day they were gone. I was fifteen. I stayed there for five years. Me and the girls
of Mexico. They sent me home just before the border was closed. All North Americans out. I got
permission to go back to New York, and for seventeen years I never left again. Until now. I won't go
back, Sax."

He leaned over and picked up a rifle. He had had it with his photographic equipment. "I have
ammunition. I've had it for years. I'm pretty good with it. I'd demonstrate, but I don't want to waste the
shell. Now, you just pick up your gear, and toss it in the boat, and get the hell out of here."

I suddenly remembered watching television as a child, when they had programs that went on around the
clock -- stories, movies. A man with a rifle stalking a deer. That's all I could remember of that program,
but it was very clear and I didn't want to go away and let Bernard be that man. I stared at the rifle until it
began to rise and I was looking down the barrel of it.

"I'll kill you, Sax. I really will," he said, and I knew he would.

I turned and tossed my pack into the boat and then climbed in. "How will you get back, if you decide to
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come back?" I felt only bitterness. I was going back and he was going to be the man with the rifle.