"Gene Wolfe - Castaway" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

Castaway
by Gene Wolfe



We picked him up on some dead world nobody ever
goes to. We did it because we had a field problem that
required a lot of tests, and that stuff is easier if you can
just dodge in and out of the ship without worrying about
the airlocks and how much air you're dumping every
time you go outside. Bad as this place was, you could
breathe--the air turned out to be real good, in fact--so
we set down in a warm belt around the middle.

Warm's one of those words, you know? It was still cold
enough for hightherms, and even with hightherms I blew
on my fingers a lot. The sun was red and real close, but
there didn't seem to be a lot of heat in it.

Anyway, he had been there twenty-seven years, he said,
and I said, standard years or world years, and he said,
they were so close it didn't make any difference. World
years were half an hour shorter now, he said, and I
should've asked why now--had they been longer a
while back? Only I didn't think of it right then.

"We got hit by the Atrothers," he said; so it had been
back during the war all right, back before I was born.
"We tried to get home, but we could see we couldn't
make it. This place was close, and we landed here."
We're not there anymore, I told him, we took off. Well,
that shut him up for the rest of the week. So next time I
tried not to say things like that. I know they had him up
to Debriefing three times. So you know they never got
much out of him, didn't get what they wanted, or they
wouldn't have talked to him so much. Somebody said
his mind was blown, and I guess that was sort of right.

Only he used to open up to me sometimes in the break
area, and that's what I want to tell about. Then maybe I
can stop thinking about him.

"There were only three of us," he said, "and Obert died
the first year and Yarmouth the second year. I thought
we were dying off one by one, and I'd go next year if
nobody came. But I didn't. We'd hung up the distress
buoy. It didn't do a bit of good, but I stayed tough."

He looked at me then like I wanted to argue. I just said,
sure.