"George A. Stewart - Earth Abides" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stewart George A)

Even so, before dusk he struggled to his feet, and lighted the kerosene
lamp. He did not want to be left in the dark.

Apprehensively, he bent his lanky body down to peer into the little mirror,
set too low for him because of the sloping roof of the cabin. His long face
was thin always, and scarcely seemed thinner now, but a reddish flush
showed through the sun-tan of his cheeks. His big blue eyes were
blood-shot, and stared back at him wildly with the glare of fever. His
light brown hair, unruly always, now stuck out in all directions,
completing the mirror-portrait of a very sick young man.

He got back into his bunk, feeling no great sense of fear although now he
more than half expected that he was dying. Soon a violent chill struck him;
from that he passed into a fever. The lamp burned steadily on the table,
and he could see around the cabin. The hammer which he had dropped on the
floor still stood there, handle pointed stiffly upwards, precariously
balanced. Being right before his eyes, the hammer occupied an unduly large
part of his consciousness-he thought about it a little disorderedly, as if


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he were making his will, an old-fashioned will in which he described the
chattels he was leaving. "One hammer, called a *single-jack,* weight of
head four pounds, handle one foot long, slightly cracked, injured by
exposure to weather, head of hammer somewhat rusted, still serviceable." He
had been extraordinarily pleased when he had found the hammer, appreciating
that actual link with the past. It had been used by some miner in the old
days when rock-drills were driven home in a low tunnel with a man swinging
a hammer in one hand; four pounds was about the weight a man could handle
in that way, and it was called a single-jack because it was managed
one-handedly. He thought, feverishly, that he might even include a picture
of the hammer as an illustration in his thesis.

Most of those hours of darkness he passed in little better than a
nightmare, racked by coughing, choking frequently, shaking with the chill
and then burning with the fever. A pink measles-like rash broke out on him.

At daybreak he felt himself again sinking into a deep sleep.

*"It has never happened!" cannot be construed to mean, "It can never
happen!"--as well say, "Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is
unbreakable," or "Because I've never died, I am immortal." One thinks first
of some great plague of insects-locusts or grasshoppers-when the species
suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically
sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals
also fluctuate. The lernmings work upon their cycle. The snowshoe-rabbits
build up through a period of years until they reach a climax when they seem