"Arcady And Boris Strugatsky. Prisoners of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора

Guy muttered and twitched in his sleep. Then he began to shiver; he
hunched himself up, as if trying to warm his body. Maxim placed Guy's head
on his knees, pressed his fingers to his temples, and tried to concentrate.
He hadn't performed psychomassage for a long time, but he knew that
everything except the patient must be excluded from one's consciousness. He
must assimilate the patient into his own healthy system. For ten or fifteen
minutes he maintained the same position, and when he returned to his normal
state of consciousness, he saw that Guy had improved. His color had
improved, his breathing was regular, and his shivering had ceased. Maxim
made a pillow out of grass and sat next to him for a while, chasing away the
insects. Suddenly he remembered the long journey ahead of them and the leaky
reactor. That was dangerous for Guy; he must figure something out. He rose
and returned to the tank.
It took him some time to remove several sheets of armor plating, held
fast by rusted rivets, from the side of the tank; then he fastened the
sheets to a ceramic shield that separated the reactor and engine from the
control compartment. As he was about to attach the last sheet, he sensed the
approach of a stranger. He thrust his head through the hatch cautiously. A
cold shiver ran through him.
On the road, about ten paces from the tank, stood three figures. Maxim
did not realize immediately that they were humans. True, they wore clothing,
and two of them were holding a pole across their shoulders, from which
dangled the bloody head of a small hoofed animal, like a deer. And a huge
rifle of unfamiliar make was slung across the pigeon breast of the third
figure. "Mutants. These are the mutants." All the tales and legends he had
heard suddenly came to mind and appeared quite plausible: cannibals,
savages, animals. Clenching his teeth, he jumped onto the armor plating and
rose to his full height. The figure holding the rifle shuffled his short
bowed legs comically, without moving from the spot. He raised his hand with
its two long multijointed fingers, hissed loudly, and then said in a
scratchy voice: "Do you want to eat?"
Maxim relaxed. "Yes."
"You won't shoot?"
"No," Maxim smiled. "I promise."

15.
Guy sat at the crude homemade table and cleaned his gun. It was almost
10:45 A.M., and the world for him was gray and colorless, cold and joyless,
dreary and painful. He had no desire to think, to see, to hear. Or even to
sleep. All he wanted was to lay his head on the table and die.
The room was small, with a single paneless window. It looked out on a
vast rust-colored wasteland cluttered with ruins and overgrown with wild
bushes. The wallpaper in the room was dried up and curling, from either heat
or age; the parquet flooring had shrunk and was burned to a crisp in one
corner. Nothing remained from its former owner except a large framed
photograph beneath broken glass. Close up one could make out an elderly man
with ridiculous sideburns wearing a silly hat that looked like a tin plate.
His eyes would have preferred not to see their surroundings; he would
have liked to howl like a homeless dog, but Maxim had issued strict orders:
"Clean that gun!" And banging his fist against the table, he had shouted to