"Chapter 05" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Dickson - Forever Man)

CHAPTER

5



JIM HAD MORE THAN A MONTH OF ACCUMULATED LEAVE TIME
coming and he took it. He wanted to go someplace with the
feel of hot sand under his bare feet and the smell of sea in the
breeze. He wanted to forget about space and about Raoul Pen
ard and La Chasse Gallerie; he wanted to forget about the old
Canadian poems and songs, and about Mary Gallegher. Above
all, he wanted to forget what she had said the last time they
had talked. Instead he wanted to fill his mind with wine,
women and song. But he lied to himself.
So he went off, relying on sand, salt-smelling breezes and
the touch of women to burn all he wanted to forget out of his
mind. He went to a place in Baja California called Barres de
Hijo and signed in at a resort there. It had everything he was
looking for, including charterboat fishing for sailfish and tar-
pon. It also-or rather the resort hotel he stayed at-had a -
swimming pool at which he met a fellow vacationer named
Barbie Novak, who did fit his ideas of beauty and liked him
even better when she found out he was one of the Frontier
Guard pilots, on leave.
The days and nights, consequcndy, wuc a p~aant blur
with Barbie for a companion, until she had to go home; and
following that there was a girl named Joan Takari. But
morning after she had left he found himself lying alone on the
beach, hoping she had gotten home all right; and he could not
remember her face.
So instead of looking around for more women to compan-
ion him, he took to sitting and walking by hinself, lying on
the beach and listening to the waves or seated up on the rocks
ovedooking a part of the shore that had no beach, watching
the surf crash on the blue-black boulders below in white foam.
It was not, he concluded, that he wanted to live forever.
But nonetheless Mary's words from their last meeting stuck in
his mind. In a way they had taken the place of the emptiness
inside him-which was still there, but was now like a dark
cavern into which a small aperture had broken, letting in a
single ray of light.
He had dreamed of space and wanted it from the first time
he had realized it was out there-which was earlier than he
could remember. All his life had pointed him at it. It was his
arena in which he could do something... something of lasting
effect. What he would do and how he would do it, he had no
idea. But he was like someone who dreams of a much-wanted
place, in a mountain so far off it was like a blue cloud on the
horizon of his babyhood, but always there, day after day. And