"David Gerrold - [SS] The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

believers. And true believers are the worst kind. They’re the ones to whom facts are
disposable.
Sometime around two or three in the afternoon, we reached the place where
the stream forked. We’d come up between the two legs and now stood on the banks
of a pond roughly the size of a football field. The water rippled peacefully under the
crisp afternoon breeze. A low concrete berm defined the lower part of the pond. The
larger of the two streams poured over a sloping dam; a break in the berm fed the
smaller. We refilled our canteens here; the water was bitterly cold. It had probably
been lying white on the ground somewhere in the highlands for a few months, until it
decided to move down here.
We found a small footbridge over the larger stream; on the other side was a
hint of a trail. Not a lot of traffic came through here, but enough to have packed the
soil. It could have just as easily been an animal highway as a human one, probably
the deer and the bears came down to the pond to drink; but the pond was artificial
and that had to mean something. If plants need water, then that means green people
need it too, right? “Do green people drink water?” Ernie asked. “Or do they just
suck moisture from the ground with their toes? Like osmosis?” (Which led him
inevitably into a riddle. “The answer is osmosis, what’s the question?” “Who led the
children of Israel out of Oz?”)
I offered my not-so-humble opinion that green people do drink water in its
liquid form. I pointed out that I had given the injured green boy a water bottle and
once he had figured out how it worked, he had sucked at it thirstily. So obviously,
green people do have working mouths. And they’re smart enough not to use them
for terrible puns.
After a bit of wrangling, we decided to follow the path north—in absolute
silence, and with frequent stops to listen for oncoming traffic. Periodically, we’d
step off the trail and listen quietly. Where we could, we used our binoculars, or the
telephoto lenses on our cameras to examine distant slopes. But so far, we’d seen
nothing out of the ordinary, and if we encountered anyone, we would have been just
what we pretended to be—three stupid hikers, lost because we were following our
trail map upside down.
 The trail wandered away from the stream that fed the pond, and then
occasionally wandered back toward it. Higher up, the path began to look more
purposeful, but we still saw no evidence that anyone had passed this way recently.
Our second night, we found what looked like it might have been a hunter’s
blind. It was a wooden deck, raised half a meter off the ground and surrounded by
foliage. It overlooked a wide meadow; the stream had widened here and a small
shallow pond had formed. Another convenient watering hole. Probably a seasonal
phenomenon. By the end of summer, it would be a dusty patch of hardened earth
marked by the impatient scrapings of deer hooves.
Inside the blind, we had what would have passed for comfort, if any of us
actually remembered what comfort was. My feet were cold, my legs were cold, my
knees were cold and noisy; and my bladder hurt, even though I’d been trying to pee
all day—or maybe because I’d been trying to pee all day. My nose was running, my
head still ached, and despite all the menthol drops I’d been sucking on, I had a
terrible cough and my throat was starting to hurt. Bert boiled some water and
shredded some tree bark into it and gave it to me to drink. God knows what it was,
but it wasn’t tea. For some reason, Ernie started to construct an elaborate pun about
finding a bar soon for his deep throat, but Bert reached over and stuck a fork
through his trachea and that kept him occupied for a while, at least until the bleeding