"Jack Williamson - The Happiest Creature" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

Or did he?
A sudden uncertainty struck him, as dawn began to break. The first gray shapes
that came out of the dark seemed utterly strange, and he was suddenly afraid the
outsiders had double-crossed him. Maybe they hadn 't really brought him back to
Earth, after all. Maybe they had marooned him on some foreign planet, where he
could never find Carmen and Gabe Melendez.
With a gasp of alarm, he snapped on the headlights. The wide white beams
washed away all that terrifying strangeness, and left only a few harmless clumps of
yucca and mesquite. He slumped back against the cushions, laughing weakly.
Now he could see the familiar peaks of Dos Lobos jutting up like jagged teeth,
black against the green glass sky. He switched off the headlights and started the
motor and eased the swaying car across the brown hummocks toward the dawn. In
a few minutes he found the highway.
JOSE 'S OASIS, ONE STOP SERVICE, 8 MILES AHEAD
He grimaced at the sign, derisively. What if he had got his twenty years for
sticking up the Oasis and shooting down old Jose. Who cared now if his mother and
his aunt had spent their last grubby dimes, paying the lawyers to keep him out of the
chair? And Carmen, what if she had spat in his face at the trial? The outsiders had
taken care of everything.
Or what if they hadn 't?
Cautiously, he slowed the long car and pulled off the pavement where it curved
into the valley. The spring rains must have already come, because the rocky slopes
were all splashed with wild flowers and tinted green with new grass. The huge old
cottonwoods along the river were just coming into leaf, delicately green.
The valley looked as kind as his old mother 's face, when she was still alive, and
the little town beyond the river seemed clean and lovely as he remembered Carmen.
Even the sky was shining like a blue glass bowl, as if the outsiders had somehow
washed and sterilized it. Maybe they had. They could do anything, except kill a man.
He chuckled, thinking of the way old baldy had made him cross his heart. Maybe
the tallow-gutted fool had really thought that would make him keep his promises. Or
was there some kind of funny business about the package that was supposed to be a
gun?
He ripped it open. There in the carton was the auto-matic he had demanded, a .45,
with an extra cartridge clip and two boxes of ammunition. It looked all right, flat and
black and deadly in his hand. He loaded it and stepped out of the car to test it.
He was aiming at an empty whisky bottle beside the pavement when he heard a
mockingbird singing in the nearest cottonwood. He shot at the bird instead, and
grinned when it dissolved into a puff of brown feathers.
"That'll be Gabe." His hard lips curled sardonically. "Coming at me like a mad
dog, if anybody ever wants to know, and I had to stop him to save my own hide."
He drove on across the river bridge into Las Verdades. The outsiders had been
here, he knew, because the dirt streets were all swept clean, and the wooden parts of
all the low adobe buildings were bright with new paint, and all he could smell was the
fragrances of coffee and hot bread, when he passed the Esperanza Cafe.
Those good odors wet his dry mouth with saliva, but he didn't stop to eat. With
the automatic lying ready beside him on the seat, he pulled into the Oasis. The place
looked empty at first and he thought for a moment that everybody was hiding from
him.
As he sat waiting watchfully, crouched down under the wheel, he had time to
notice that all the shattered glass had been neatly replaced. Even the marks of his