"Chad Oliver - The Winds of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

juices trickled down his throat, warming him. Meat. Tough, but sweet and clean.
The man fed him, and Wes ate. He swallowed one steak and half of another before he was through,
telling himself he should take it easy but being too hungry to care. Then the man gave him some cold
water from a skin bag.
"Thanks," Wes said. His voice was a croak.
The man nodded, but said nothing. He went back to work on his own meal, chewing slowly and
thoughtfully, as though making up for lost time. Wes lay on the floor, feel-ing a drowsy strength flow back
into him. Now was his chance, he thought. Get up, slug that man, get out somehow—
Before he could frame much of a plan he was asleep. He did not dream. He had no way of telling
how long he slept, but he awoke refreshed. He opened one eye.
The man was watching him, smiling a little. The man took his arm, helped him up. Wes was dizzy, but
he could stand. The man took him step by step over to the circular port that was the only exit to the vault.
He stood him against it, then backed off and sat down on the floor.
Free. I'm free. He's letting me go.
Desperately Wes fumbled at the projections on the port. He pulled them, pushed them, twisted them,
hit at them with his fists. Nothing happened. He put his shoulder against the port and pushed. The circular
dpor did not move. He backed off, ran at it blindly.
It was, literally, like running into a stone wall.
He collapsed, sobbing.
The man picked him up, gave him another drink of water. Then he looked at Wes and shook his
head. The meaning was clear enough. Wes couldn't get out unless the man let him out.
And Wes suspected it would be a subarctic afternoon in hell before that happened.
The man sat down and gave Wes a cold piece of steak. Wes ate it without thinking. His mind was a
perfect blank, holding the terror out.
Then the man leaned forward. He pointed at himself. "Arvon," he said slowly and distinctly. His voice
was low and calm.
Wes hesitated. Then he nodded, pointed at himself. "Wes," he said. "Wes Chase."
The man smiled eagerly.
In a way that was the real beginning.

Wes Chase didn't know a phoneme from a hole in the ground, and if he had ever heard of a lexicon
he would have vaguely associated it with a Roman lawgiver. Linguistics hadn't exactly been all the rage of
the campus when Wes was taking pre-med at Ohio State, and the medical school at the University of
Cincinnati had emphasized practical subjects.
Of course, a man never knew what was going to be practical and what wasn't. This wasn't the first
time that Wes had regretted the pressures of a busy life, a life that nibbled you to death with schedules
and telephones and appointments and runny noses. If only there were time to find out a few things, to
read, to listen …
But it was, a little late now.
Wes did know, from his agonizing battle with Latin and the damnable tripartite division of Gaul, that
learning a language was apt to be a losing proposition even under the best of circumstances. When a man
had to learn a language from scratch, without the medium of a common language to explain things in, it
should take a spell.
It did.
Nevertheless, Arvon learned with incredible rapidity. He made no attempt to teach Wes his own
language, whatever that might have been, but concentrated on mastering English. He started with nouns,
things that could be pointed to: cave, shirt, shoes, meat, candy. He kept a list of words, writing them
down on a curious sort of tablet, and Wes soon caught on to the fact that Arvon was not so much after
the words themselves as he was interested in the significant sounds that went into them. He used
recording symbols Wes had never seen before, but he assumed that they were phonetic marks of some