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

But finally he thought of something he could say that
didn't make him feel worse, and he thought maybe it
had even made her feel better, a little. He said, "I love
you." It seemed like it worked, he said, and so he said it
again and again.

And that is all I remember about him except for when
we set down and he left the ship. Only I want to say
this. I know he was crazy, and if you read this and want
to tell me I was crazy too to hang out with him in the
break area like I did for so long, that's all right. I knew he
was crazy, but he was somebody new and it was kind of
fun to pull it out of him like I did and see what he would
say.

Besides, he was a lot older than I am and his face had all
these lines because of being down there so long and
practically starving, so he was fun to look at, and the
other thing was the color. The ship is all white, the walls
and ceilings and floor and everything else. That makes it
easy to spot fluid leaks and sometimes shorts that start
little fires someplace. But all that white and the white
uniforms and so on seem like they just suck the color
out of everything except blood.

Only it never sucked the color out of him, and that made
him special to me. Nice to look at, and fun, too. I
remember seeing him walking along Corridor A the last
time. He was headed for the lock and going out, and I
knew it from the old, old dress blues and the little bag in
his hand. And I thought, oh shit, that's the last color we
had and now he's going and this really licks.
And it did, too.

So I ran and said goodbye and how much I was going to
miss him and called him Mate and all that. You know.
And he was nice and we talked a little bit more, just
standing there in Corridor A.

Of course I put my elbow in it, the way I always did
sooner or later. I said about the woman that had been
dirtside with him, was she still alive when we took him
off, because he'd said how sick she was, and I thought
he wouldn't go off and leave her.

He sort of smiled. I never had seen a smile like that
before, and I don't ever want to see another one. "She
was and she wasn't," he said. "There were things inside
her, eating the corpse. Does that count?"