"Edgar Pangborn - A Master of Babylon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pangborn Edgar)

data. Maybe it was somewhere around midnight.
He climbed on the sill and lifted the canoe over it to the motionless water inside. Useless, he decided,
as soon as the grunting effort was finished. That fire had been lit before daylight passed; whoever lit it
would have seen the canoe, might even have been watching Brian himself come home from his hunting.
The canoe's disappearance in the night would only rouse further curiosity. But Brian was too exhausted
to lift it back.
And why assume that the maker of the bonfire was necessarily hostile? Might be good company. . . .
He pulled his raft through the darkness, secured it at the stairway, and groped back to his cave.
He locked the door. The venison was waiting; the sight made him ravenous. He lit a small fire in the
stove, one that he hoped would not still be sending smoke from the ventilator shaft when morning came.
He cooked the meat crudely and wolfed it down, all enjoyment gone at the first mouthful. He was
shocked to discover the dirtiness of his white beard. He hadn't given himself a real bath in—weeks, was
it? He searched for scissors and spent an absentminded while in trimming the beard back to shortness.
He ought to take some soap—valuable stuff—down to Moses's room, and wash.
Clothes, too. People probably still wore clothes. He had worn none for years, except for sandals. He
used a carrying satchel for trips to the mainland. He had enjoyed the freedom at first, and especially the
dis-covery that in his rugged fifties he did not need clothes even for the soft winters, except perhaps a
light cov-ering when he slept. Later, total nakedness had become so natural it required no thought at all.
But the owner of that bonfire could have inherited or retained the pruderies of the lost culture.
He checked his rifles. The .22 automatic, an Army model from the 2040s, was the best—any amount
of death in that. The tiny bullets carried a paralytic poi-son: graze a man's finger and he was almost
painlessly dead in three minutes. Effective range, with telescopic sights, three kilometers; weight, a scant
five pounds. Brian sat a long time cuddling that triumph of mili-tary science, listening for sounds that never
came. Would it be two o'clock? He wished he could have seen the Time Satellite, renamed in his mind
the Mid-night Star, but when he was down there at his port, he had not once looked up at the night sky.
Delicate and beautiful, bearing its everlasting freight of men who must have been dead now for
twenty-five years and who would be dead a very long time—well, it was better than a clock, if you
happened to look at the midnight sky at the right time of the month when the man-made star caught the
moonlight. But he had missed it tonight. Three o'clock?. . .
At some time during the long dark he put the rifle away on the floor. With studied, self-conscious
con-tempt for his own weakness, he unlocked the door and strode out noisily into the Hall of Music, with
a fresh-lit candle. This same bravado, he knew, might dis-solve at the first alien noise. While it lasted, it
was invigorating.
The windows were still black with night. As if the candle flame had found its own way, Brian was
standing by the ancient marimba in the main hall, the gleam slanting carelessly away from his gaunt hand.
And nearby sat the Stone Age god.
It startled him. He remembered clearly how he himself had placed it there, obeying a half-humorous
whim. The image and the singing stones were both magnificently older than history, so why shouldn't they
live together? Whenever he dusted the marimba, he dusted the image respectfully, and its table. It would
not have needed much urging from the im-pulses of a lonely mind to make him place offerings before
it—winking first, of course, to indicate that rituals suitable to a pair of aging gentlemen did not have to be
sensible in order to be good.
The clay face remembering eternity was not de-formed by the episode of civilization. Chipped places
were simple honorable scars. The two faces stared mildly from the single head, uncommunicative, serene.
A wooden hammer of modern make rested on the marimba. Softly Brian tapped a few of the stones.
He struck the shrillest one harder, waking many slow-dying overtones, and laid the hammer down,
listening until the last murmur perished and a drop of wax hurt his thumb. He returned to his cave and
blew out the candle, never thinking of the door, or if he thought, not caring.
Face down, he rolled his head and clenched his fin-gers into his pallet, seeking in pain, finding at last
the relief of stormy childish weeping in the dark.