"James Tiptree Jr - The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

was with him.)
Ain's flight went via Iceland with an hour's delay at Keflavik. Ain walked
over to the airport park, gratefully breathing the sea-filled air. Every few
breaths he shuddered. Under the whine of bulldozers the sea could be
heard running its huge paws up and down the keyboard of the land. The
little park had a grove of yellowed birches, and a flock of wheatears
foraged by the path. Next month they would be in North Africa, Ain
thought. Two thousand miles of tiny wing-beats. He threw them some
crumbs from a packet in his pocket.
The woman seemed stronger here. She was panting in the sea wind, her
large eyes fixed on Ain. Above her the birches were as gold as those where
he had first seen her, the day his life began. . . . Squatting under a stump
to watch a shrewmouse he had been, when he caught a falling ripple of
green and recognized the shocking girl-flesh, creamy,
pink-tipped—coming toward him among the golden bracken! Young Ain
held his breath, his nose in the sweet moss and his heart going crash—
crash. And then he was staring at the outrageous fall of that hair down
her narrow back, watching it dance around her heart-shaped buttocks,
while the shrewmouse ran over his paralyzed hand. The lake was utterly
still, dusty silver under the misty sky, and she made no more than a
muskrat's ripple to rock the floating golden leaves. The silence closed back,
the trees burning like torches where the naked girl had walked the wild
wood, reflected in Ain's shining eyes. For a time he believed he had seen
an oread.
Ain was last on board for the Glasgow leg. The stewardess recalled
dimly that he seemed restless. She could not identify the woman. There
were a lot of women on board, and babies. Her passenger list had had
several errors.
At Glasgow airport a waiter remembered that a man like Ain had called
for Scottish oatmeal, and eaten two bowls, although of course it wasn't
really oatmeal. A young mother with a pram saw him tossing crumbs to
the birds.
When he checked in at the BOAC desk, he was hailed by a Glasgow
professor who was going to the same conference at Moscow. This man had
been one of Ain's teachers. (It was now known that Ain had done his
postgraduate work in Europe.) They chatted all the way across the North
Sea.
"I wondered about that," the professor said later. "Why have you come
round about? I asked him. He told me the direct flights were booked up."
(This was found to be untrue: Ain had apparently avoided the Moscow jet
to escape attention.)
The professor spoke with relish of Ain's work.
"Brilliant? Oh, aye. And stubborn, too; very very stubborn. It was as
though a concept—often the simplest relation, mind you—would stop him
in his tracks, and fascinate him. He would hunt all round it instead of
going on to the next thing as a more docile mind would. Truthfully, I
wondered at first if he could be just a bit thick. But you recall who it was
said that the capacity for wonder at matters of common acceptance
occurs in the superior mind? And, of course, so it proved when he shook
us all up over that enzyme conversion business. A pity your government