"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

It was beautiful. On a leather thong, a cross carved from ivory, with a circle in its
center, elaborated with complex intaglio. Red jewels were set where Jesus' hands and feet
had been.
"It's Russian style," he said. "It might be old."
I put it around my neck and kissed him. To my surprise, he kissed me back. "We
won't be together, Christmas," he said in a hoarse whisper,
I found my voice and introduced Grace. They all talked while I busied myself
making sandwiches. Cutting the onions brought tears.
A horrible accident.

In the morning we could appreciate the sailors' concern over the Wrangell Narrows. We
had to negotiate a slow winding course marked off by buoys and stakes, sometimes with
only a couple of yards' leeway.
Most ships would steam straight up to Juneau, but the White Nights had cargo
bound for Sitka, the territorial capital and the only large place in Alaska with a Russian
population. The ship was carrying books and magazines in that language, and cases of
vodka, which at that time was not well known in the United States.
So we turned west and then backtracked south for a day. The prospectors
grumbled about it, but of course I didn't mind—a few more days with my son, and an
exotic small city to visit.
We were about twenty miles from Sitka when disaster struck. There was an
explosion belowdecks, followed by an unearthly noise: the shriek of steam escaping,
combined with a man's dying wail.
They brought him up on the deck. I hope never to see a more horrible sight. The
flesh from one side of his face had been flayed off completely, nothing but glistening
grayish bone and the ruin of an eye. His throat and shoulder on that side were just a mass
of gore, and most of his upper body was as red as a lobster. As they laid him down on the
deck, he took a few bubbling breaths and was still. The anchor chain rattled down.
The prospectors and sailors stood around his body in a silent circle. Then one of
the crew came to his side and fell to both knees, put his hands together, and said what
must have been a prayer in Russian, ending in a sob.
Two men went below and returned with a coffin. It was sobering to note that they
were prepared for death that way. I wondered how many such boxes they carried.
The first mate issued a few quiet orders, and most of the crew went off to lower a
boat. It drifted away from us with three aboard, who raised a simple lateen sail and then
moved swiftly downstream.
Leon, the crew member who was easiest with English, explained the situation to
us. It was plain luck, he said, that many more were not injured or killed. The boiler's
emergency valve apparently got clogged—it was like a pressure-cooker plug of soft
metal—and before anybody saw what was happening, a seam burst. The dead man, Pyotr,
had been the only person on that side of the boiler.
The men in the boat were going to Sitka to arrange for a tow. There was no way
they could repair the boiler with the tools on board. We would be in Sitka for as long as it
took us to repair or replace the boiler.
The prospectors accepted this with uncharacteristic silence, after the sudden
confrontation with mortality.
The crew took the coffin below, and the mood became less morbid. I remained
deeply shaken, and Daniel was pallid. When the men started loud talk and laughter, I
wanted to shush them—but of course they were only dealing with it in their own way.
There was a lot of whiskey going around, and some of the crew came up on deck with a