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

for you or right for me?"
"Both," Wes almost shouted. "Right's right."
Arvon smiled and shook his head. "I try to explain," he said. He stopped, unsatisfied. "I will try to
explain," he corrected himself. "You try to understand. I—we—mean no harm to you. I—we—do what
we must. Understand."
Wes waited.
The man's strange gray eyes grew distant, lost. His tongue groped with words that were not his
words. He tried to tell a story that was beyond telling, across a gulf that could not be bridged.
And Weston Chase sat in the bare rock vault, where a tiny fire threw ghostly shadows across the
dark forms who slept as only the dead may sleep, and the still air was hushed with long, long silences. He
sat, and he listened, and he tried to understand.
The man talked on and on and on, and the fire grew low, and the pale radiance in the cavern was like
the frozen silver of the moon …


FIVE
The ship was alone.
She was moving, and moving fast, but there was nothing around her to show her speed. She seemed
suspended in a featureless universe of gray, transfixed in an empty fog, beyond space, beyond time,
beyond understanding.
There were no stars, no planets, no far galaxies like milky jewels against the shadowed velvet of
space.
There was the ship, and the grayness, and that was all.
Inside the ship a plump, balding man named Nlesine jerked a stubby thumb toward the blue metal
wall that sealed them from the desolation Outside. "In my humble opinion," he said, "that is the ideal home
for humanity out there. We got off on the wrong foot right at the start, as any idiot should be able to
see—even you, Tsriga. Man is slime, an infection in the cosmos. Why should he live on green planets
under blue skies? If ever there were an organism that had earned an isolated place in Nowhere, man is
it."
The high, irritating hum of the atomics powering the distortion field filled the ship. The sensation was
precisely that of listening to a bomb falling toward you, a bomb that never hit.
Tsriga, his rather flashy clothes startling in the subdued green room, was bitingly conscious of his
youth, but determined to cover it up at all costs. He knew that Nlesine was baiting him; very well, he
would go him one better. "You've understated the case," he said. "You're too optimistic, as usual. I think
that even Nowhere is too fine a place for us. What we need is Somewhere more gruesome than
Nowhere."
Nlesine laughed. He laughed considerably more than the joke warranted. He laughed until the tears
ran out of his eyes. "You're a card, Tsriga," he said. "You should insure that priceless sense of humor for
a billion credits, so that you may always be a little ray of sunshine in our lives."
"Go to hell," Tsriga said, and moved away.
Nlesine stopped laughing and turned to Arvon, who was seated across from him reading a novel.
"What do you think, handsome?"
Arvon lowered the book reluctantly. "I think you ride the kid too much."
 Nlesine made an impolite noise. "He's got to grow up sometime."
"Don't we all?"
Nlesine snorted. "A great line. Sounds like one of my own novels. You read too many books, Arvon.
You're turning into an Intellectual. You should get out on the farm, sniff the barnyard smells, learn to live
."
Arvon smiled a little, his tall body relaxed in his chair, his book balanced easily in his strong hand. His
gray eyes were more puzzled than amused, however. "I've never understood why you work so hard to