"Kim Stanley Robinson - Kistenpass" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

I stopped running. All was suddenly clear: I had been sitting on the edge of his landing pad. It was the
only flat spot around. He was bringing supplies to the little locked shed under the spur.

Well of course! I had not fallen into a horror movie after all! I should have been able to figure it out
earlier.

I stood there feeling my heart blast the blood through me. All my capillaries throbbed at every hit, and my
vision was bouncing.

The pilot killed the engine and climbed out of the cockpit. I walked back down the hill toward him,
anxious to apologize for taking so long to figure out what was happening.
He saw me and said something before bending to his cargo door, but there was still lot of noise and I
couldn’t hear him. I came a little closer to yell that I didn’t speak much German, and all of a sudden he
straightened up and shouted, “ACHTUNG!”

I stopped in my tracks. He pointed up at the blades still thwacking the air overhead. In that instant I saw
that as rotor blades slow down they become visible from the inside out. What I had assumed were the
ends of the blades were actually just the ends of their visible part. Looking more closely I saw the faint
blur of sky that marked their real ends; the blades were about twice as long as I had thought they were.
Not only that, but as they slowed they were beginning to droop, and I was descending onto the flat from
the slope above. So the actual tips of the blades, now quite visible to me, were at my head level, and
about fifteen feet away.

I turned and walked off. The pilot was busy anyway, and I had lost all interest in talking to him. I got out
of there.

Several minutes down the trail I noticed that my half-eaten sandwich was still in my hand, squished into a
ribbed tube of dough. I nibbled it as I hiked, and realized after a while that I was too deaf to hear myself
chew. I looked back once or twice without intending to. I came to some of the deepest suncups I had
ever seen, skidded this way and that on snow that had lost all structural integrity. It didn’t matter; I
wasn’t there anyway.



When I trudged up the final approach to the Muttseehutte I was really ready to sit down and have a
caffee fertig or two, or three. After that I would continue over a nearby rise called the Muttenchopf, and
descend to the cable car that would drop me to the road at Tierfed.

The hut keeper was standing on the porch outside his door. He greeted me as I approached:
“Grüüüüt-zi!” It was the Swiss greeting at its most Swiss.

He was short and bald, barrel-chested and suntanned, with immense forearms. He asked me where I had
come from and I told him, re-entering that zone of competence in German that I had magically occupied
during my time with Mario. The hut keeper asked questions about snow conditions on the south side of
the pass, and I described what I had seen, and it was all as clear as could be. I did not attempt to tell him
about my encounter with the helicopter, which was beyond my German to express, and so the
conversation proceeded well. At one point, enjoying my ability to do it, I asked him how long it would
take me to hike over the Muttenchopf, and when the last cable car of the day left Galbchopf for Tierfed.