"Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Hunters of the Red Moon - 1973" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bradley Marion Zimmer)

Bradley, Marion Zimmer - Hunters of the Red Moon orig




COPYRIGHT 1973, BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

All Rights Reserved. Cover art by Carl Lundgren

DEDICATION

Grateful thanks and acknowledgments are due to PAUL EDWIN ZIMMER

Marshal and Weapons Consultant of the Society for Creative Anachronism who kindly supplied me with information about the nature and use of all the weapons used in the Hunt, and provided continuity for all the fighting scenes. However, the reader is urgently requested not to blame him for any feckless mistakes which I may have made in using the material which he supplied. Whatever is good or accurate in what I say of weapons is my good brother's; whatever is wrong or misinformed is certainly my own.

-M.Z.B.



CHAPTER ONE

That speck of light had been hanging in the same part of the sky, it seemed, for a long time.

Dane Marsh lounged on the prow of the _Seadrift, naked except for trunks and a loose shirt flung over his sunburned shoulders, and watched the unmoving point of light. _Sun on the wing of a plane, he thought _Sign of life, the first in days. Human life, that is; plenty of flying fish,- dolphins; depends how far you want to go down the scale to call life; billions and billions of shrimp and plankton.

_But we're off the regular jet plane routes, and way off the shipping lanes. The last ship I sighted was that tanker nineteen days ago.

He wondered if it _was a plane.

He entertained himself briefly with the thought of men in business suits, women in nylons and furs, seated in orderly rows, maybe even watching a movie, eighteen hundred miles from the nearest coast. Out here, where two hundred years ago, Captain Bligh and twenty-two men sailed for weeks and months in an open boat, starving and burned up by the sun; and now Pan American Airlines flew over the same area in a few hours, just time enough for an American first-run movie and a couple of drinks.

I _wouldn't mind one of those drinks, right now, with ice in it, Dane thought. _Seadrift did pretty well, all things considered, in the food and drink department, what with freeze-dried chow mein and beef stroganoff, but he would like a long cool drink with ice in it, served to him by one of those pretty stewardesses. A refrigerator on a thirty-foot boat would be stretching things a little.

_Damn it, that plane doesn't seem to be moving. It's just hanging there. One place.

Obviously, then, Dane told himself without moving from his idle vantage point, it couldn't be a plane. Reflection on a cloud, or something.

For miles around, in every direction, the Pacific was quiet, slow ripples moving, almost imperceptibly, out of the east and dying away toward the sunset. _Seadrift was ghosting along, her vast acreage of spinnaker set to catch the lightest of airs-a light breeze usually sprang up about sundown-but for the moment, even the solitary crew was superfluous. Dane Marsh knew he should get up, check the self-steering, go below and make himself a pot of tea, put out a fishline for any stray overnight catch, but the cumulative effect of sun and sea and silence held him half hypnotized, staring at the distant and unmoving light which looked more and more like the typical circular flash of sunlight on bright metal, the wing of a distant plane. He liked the idea that it was a plane, that there were other human beings within sight, if out of reach. Stewardesses in miniskirts.

_It's been two hundred and eighty-four days, by actual count, since I saw a woman who could speak English. Or even one who couldn't. Why the hell did I ever get this notion, anyway? Sailing around the world- alone in a small boat-_it's not as if I'd be the first. Or even the fastest.

It seemed a good idea at the time, that's all.

So what if he wasn't the first? These days, everything worth doing, in the adventure line, had already been done. Climbing Everest Sailing around the Horn alone. Reaching the North Pole. Everything except going to the moon, and that took a kind of education and sponsorship he never could manage.

I envy _the first guy to hike around it on foot. Now there's _an adventure for some lucky bastard, someday. . . .