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

type. He started with hundreds, marking every tone and pause and inflection, but rapidly whittled his
alphabet down to a realistic series of marks as he discovered what counted in English and what didn't.
Then he went on to the structure of the language, the way the word units were strung together. When he
got the hang of the agent-verb-object series, his progress was rapid.
Still, it took time.

There was time to be bored, even in this uncanny, impossible vault in the rock of a Colorado
mountain. There was time to eat fresh meat and fish until he was sick of them. There was time to be
impatient, and worry, and be afraid.
There was too much time to remember the life he had cherished so little—the life that waited for him
now at the foot of a winding trail, where an icy trout stream chuckled out into a valley of green and gold.
A valley in the sun. He had not seen the sun for—how long?
He could see every detail of his life in the sun: the clear warmth of morning before the smog rolled in,
the carbon trails down the Hollywood Freeway, the dark sparkling green of dichondra under the
sprinklers, the damp red banks of geraniums, the bright flowered shirts by the sea in Santa Monica …
He could see it.
And Jo—-where was Jo? Was she lonely in that empty house that they had shared? Or was she—the
thought would not go away—was she just a little glad that he was gone? She had failed him in many
ways, but what kind of a life had he given her, really?
There was time for too many memories, not all of them pleasant.
But Arvon stuck with it, with a steady patience that still could not hide the light in his eyes. He
cracked the language barrier, imperfectly at first, and then the vault was a little less lonely, a little less
alien.
Wer was caught in a situation he could not control; he recognized that and tried fo adjust himself to it.
He was as nearly helpless as a man could be, but some of his fear was gone now.
He even managed to forget the bodies in the niches, at least most of the time.
He began to feel a charge of excitement, a thrill of being close to something utterly beyond his
understanding. It was a sensation he had had once before in his life, when he had started out to do
endocrine research soon after leaving medical school. He had given that up little by little; he had never
really known why.
Well, he couldn't give this up.
Almost, he was glad that he couldn't.
He made himself as comfortable as he could, and he knew that he was sitting on a story that would
make the first atomic bomb seem like a back-page gossip item for a movie columnist. It was not an
altogether unpleasant sensation.
He talked, and listened, and tried to do the hardest thing of all.
He tried to understand.

Wes had developed, over the years, a rule-of-thumb psychology that all doctors had to have.
Medicine was not all midnight jaunts with the accelerator floored and crises in the operating room,
particularly if you happened to be an eye, ear, nose, and throat man. A great deal of his practice was
routine, and a lot of it was a crashing bore. He played a game with himself during the long office
afternoons, trying to size up new patients as Miss Hill showed them through the door. Were they really
sick, or after drugs on one pretext or another? Were they the nervous type who caught pneumonia every
time they sneezed, or were they actually in bad shape? What did they do for a living? More importantly,
sometimes, what did they want to do for a living?
Wes was pretty good at it. He could often peg a person within two minutes, and be close enough to
be of some aid in the diagnosis. But how did you evaluate the personality of a man with whom you had
nothing in common? How much of what he thought of as personality was just a cut of clothes, a way of
speaking, a choice of familiar pastimes, a taste for Toynbee or funny books?