"Judith Merril - A Woman of the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

till dawn here in town, and get some sleep, and then be able to pick their roads a little better in the light.
Nobody would come this far after them. And even if they did, they wouldn't start till after the sun was
up.
"I'm sorry," she said again. "Look, we better take turns sleeping. I had a kind of a nap already.
You've been doing all the work. Why don't you go in back and stretch out, and I'll wake you up later . .
."
"There's other things I could use more than sleep," he said, and tried to get hold of her again.
"Oh, Tommy," she said, "not now. Here, I mean. Where anybody could be . . . oh you know!" And
when he wouldn't stop, she said, "Besides, I'm scared. Listen, one of us has to keep watch. If anybody
came up, we might not hear it, and maybe we'd both fall asleep . . . please, Tommy, can't you wait a little
while?"
So he climbed over into the back seat, and she, sat there wide awake and waiting eagerly for dawn.
One hundred and eighteen miles from Hobeyville, about ten o'clock in the morning of their third day,
the motor coughed feebly, and Tommy got out to unscrew their next-to-last spare can of gas.
"Nice-lookin' country here," he said wistfully, when he got back in, and this time she agreed with
him.
"There's a river over that way," she reminded him. "If we can find a way to get over to it . . ."
"Okay, baby, you're the boss." He started the motor again, and they crept forward, bouncing and
jumping as the two bare rims hit the potholed remnant of a highway. It was easier, actually, when he
turned off onto a grassy strip between trees and brush, that looked like it might have been a dirt road
once; here the new growth cushioned them a little. They emerged on a high cliff, overhanging the river
bank.
He parked in the shelter of a tree, and .got out to scout the woods a little ways in, while she covered
him from the car with the Winchester.
"Don't see no signs of people," he announced when he came back. "Plenty of rabbits, though. Pretty
lively-lookin', too."
She nodded, and got out and stretched. Then they both strapped on their packs, and picked up their
rifles, and locked the car up tight.
Single-file, because there were bad chunks out of the road, they started walking down along the edge
of the cliff. Below them, they could see a stretch of water for perhaps a mile in either direction.
On the opposite shore of the river there was no cliff: just a slow-rising hillside, with brown-leafed
trees not turned near as far as the ones back home; and between the trees and the river a grey dry stretch
of rubble and debris from the spring floods. Stones and boulders, twisted branches, a piece of
somebody's roof standing on edge not twenty yards upstream from the dug-out foundations of what once
must have been somebody's river-edge cottage or camp.
Outside of the river and themselves, and a few birds circling lazily near the cliff, nothing moved. It
was hard to think of danger lurking in the painted landscape.
The girl nodded, smiling. "Just like home," she said, thinking of the creek down in the village, when
the big dam went last spring.
"Yeah." Tommy stopped to sling his rifle over his shoulder, and shift the knife on his belt closer to his
hand. "If I see another one o' them rabbits, I'm gonna try for 'im—what do you think?"
"Sure," he said. "Steve's crazy anyhow." Steve wouldn't let them hunt any farther than ten miles from
the farm. He kept saying the animals anyplace around a bombed area would be poisonous, and there
was no way to know how close you were to a fallout section, once you got away from the farm. But
they'd have to start living off the land sooner or later, and this certainly looked like healthy country. "He's
crazy," she said again. "He's got everybody up there so scared they won't blow their noses without
asking. . ."
They got a rabbit for lunch, and made a fire and hot coffee and Tommy carried up water from the
river for them to boil and fill the jugs again. He even made an extra trip for a bucket full to get washed
with; and in spite of her kidding, he heated up a cupful for himself, and got out his father's old straight