"Henry Kuttner - We Guard the Black Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kuttner Henry)

WE GUARD THE BLACK PLANET!

Henry Kuttner

The stratoship dropped me at Stockholm, and an air-ferry took me to Thunder
Fjord, where I had been born. In six years nothing had changed. The black
rocks still jutted out into the tossing seas, where the red sails of Vikings
had once flaunted, and the deep roar of the waters came up to greet me.
Against the sky Freya, my father's gerfalcon, was wheeling. And high on the
crag was the Hall, its tower keeping unceasing vigil over the northern ocean.

On the porch my father was waiting, a giant who had grown old. Nils Esterling
had always been a silent man. His thin lips seemed clamped tight upon some
secret he never told, and I think I was always a little afraid of him, though
he was never unkind. But between us was a gulf. Nils seemed —shackled. I
realized that first when I saw him watching the birds go south before the
approach of winter. His eyes held a sick longing that, somehow, made me
uneasy.

Shackled, silent, taciturn, he had grown old, always a little withdrawn from
the world, always I thought, afraid of the stars. In the daytime he would
watch his gerfalcon against the deep blue of the sky, but at night he drew the
shades and would not venture out. The stars meant something to him. Only once,
I knew, he had been in space; he never ventured beyond the atmosphere again.
What had happened out there I did not know. But Nils Esterling came back
changed, with something dead inside his soul.

I was going out now. In my pocket were my papers, the result of six years of
exhausting work at Sky Point, where I had been a cadet. I was shipping
tomorrow on the Martins, Callisto bound. Nils had asked me to come home first.

So I was here, and the gerfalcon came down wheeling, dropping, its talons
clamping like iron on my father's gloved

wrist. It was like a w^lcorne. Freya was old, too, but her golden eyes were
stil^ bright, her grip still deadly.

Nils shook hands with me without rising. He gestured me to a chair. "I'm glad
you came back, Arn. So you passed. That was good to hear. You'll be in space
tomorrow."

"For Callisto," I said. "How are you, Nils? I was afraid—"

His smile held no mirth. "That I was ill? Or perhaps dying. No, Arn. I've been
dying for forty years—" He looked at the gerfalcon. "It doesn't matter a great
deal now. Except that I hope it comes soon. You'll know why when I tell you
about —about what happened to me in space four decades ago. I'll try not to be
bitter, but it's hard. Damned hard." Again Nils looked at the gerfalcon.

He went on after a moment, threading the cord through Freya's jesses. "You