"Robert F. Young - Little Dog Gone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

He could remember choosing a planet at random and booking passage for it at the Great Eastern
Spaceport, and he could vaguely remember boarding a subspace liner and long hours spent in the
starbar, talking with other passengers now and then, but mostly to himself. But that was all he could
remember. Sometime during the voyage he had reached the point of no-pain and non-remembrance.
Somewhere along the line he had scaled the heights of Never Come Tomorrow and thumbed his nose at
the cosmos.
And now, tomorrow had come. And the heights were hopelessly behind him.
He forced himself to his feet. His head was one vast gnawing ache, his body, a lump of clay
supported by unfeeling stilts that once had been a pair of legs. Hatless. coatless, begrimed of slacks and
shirt, he tamed and faced the way he must have come. There was a road of sorts not too far distant, and
presently he was walking along it toward a misted huddle of buildings that spelled a town.
A soft whimpering sound came from behind him. He stopped and turned. The little dog stopped, too.
It fixed him with a forlorn eye. "Well, what do you know?" Hayes said. And then, "Come on, Bar-rag. If
you'll promise not to disappear on me again, I'll stake you to a meal."
"Rowp!" the little dog answered, and rotated its tail. Hayes waited till it caught up to him, then tamed
and continued on his way.

II

He was sweating when he came to the first house, and yet he was shivering, too. By the time he
reached the business section, his chest was paining him so acutely that he could barely breathe.
The business section was still asleep, but it informed him by means of its unpretentious facades and
crude wooden walkways that the town was an out-planet settlement. How-ever, there were thousands of
out-planet settlements. This could be any one of them. The place-name, when he finally spotted it on the
facade of the only hotel, told him nothing:
THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS
He headed for the hotel, Bar-rag trotting at his heels. The doors were open, but there was no one on
the immediate premises. He looked around. If he had ever been there before, the memory eluded him.
He stepped into the bar. That at least ought to be familiar, and familiar it turned out to be. However, the
bell that the big raftered room with its old-fashioned tables and chairs rang in his mind was faint indeed.
While he knew that he had been there recently, he could not remember any detail of his visit.
He chose a table at random and sat down. Bar-rag, obviously disconcerted by its new surroundings,
slipped beneath the table and curled up at his feet. The room was as devoid of decor as it was of people.
Two high windows looked out into the street, a liana-like rope looped incongruously down from a
centrally-located rafter to a small gallery on the wall opposite the bar, and there was a doorway in the
rear that presumably led to the kitchen.
Hayes pounded on the tabletop. Someone ought to be up at least.
Someone was: a tall girl with shoulder-length blonde hair, rattler wide hips, and nice legs. She
advanced purposefully into the room through the doorway at the rear, her blue eyes bright with
indignation. "Breakfast isn't served till eight-thirty!" she snapped. "Just who in hell do you think you are,
mister?" Abruptly she stopped in her tracks. Then, slowly, she covered the remaining distance to the
table, eyes no longer indignant. "I'm sorry, Mr. Hayes," she said. "I didn't recognize you."
She had a full, oval face, but her rather high cheekbones and the way she wore her hair made her
cheeks seem thin. Hayes judged her to be somewhere in her late twenties or early thirties, which put her
pretty much in his own age-category. However, he did not know her from Eve. "When did we meet?" he
asked.
"We didn't, but I know you from your teletheatre roles. Last night when you came into the bar I
recognized you right away." Briefly, she lowered her eyes. She was wearing a knee-length floral dress
that covered most of her shoulders, and her hair lay upon the false flowers like morning sunshine.
"YouтАФyou might say I'm one of your many admirers."