"Connie Willis - Schwarzschild Radius" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

looks at my fingers. They are swollen and red. Muller leans over the doctor's shoulder. "I have a theory
about Lieutenant Schwarzschild's disease," he says.

"Shut up," I say. "I don't want to hear any more of your stupid theories," and do not even care about the
wounded look on Muller's face or the way he goes and sits by the wireless. For now I have a theory, and
it is more horrible than anything Muller could have dreamed of.

We are all of us—Muller, and the recruit who is trying to put together Eisner's motorcycle, and perhaps
even the doctor with his steady bedside voice—afraid of the front. But our fear is not complete, because
unspoken in it is our belief that the front is something separate from us, something we can keep away
from by keeping the wireless or the motorcycle fixed, something we can survive by flattening our faces
into the frozen earth, something we can escape altogether by being invalided out.

But the front is not separate. It is inside Schwarzs-child, and the symptoms I have been sending out,
suppu-rative bullae and excoriated lesions, are not what is wrong with him at all. The lesions on his skin
are only the barbed wire and shell holes and connecting trenches of a front that is somewhere farther in.

The doctor puts a new dressing of crepe paper on my hand. "I have tried to invalid Schwarzschild out,"
the doctor says, and Muller looks at him, astounded. "The supply lines are blocked with snow."

"Schwarzschild cannot be invalided out," I say. "The front is inside him."

The doctor puts the roll of crepe paper back in his kit and closes it. "When the roads open again, I will
invalid you out for frostbite. And Muller, too."

Muller is so surprised, he blurts, "I do not have frostbite."
But the doctor is no longer listening. "You must both escape," he says—and I am not sure he is even
listening to himself—"while you can."

"I have a theory about why you have not told me what is wrong with Schwarzschild," Muller says as soon
as the doctor is gone.

"I am going for the mail."

"There will not be any mail," Muller shouts after me. "The supply lines are blocked." But the mail is there,
scattered among the motorcycle parts. There are only a few parts left. As soon as the roads are cleared,
the recruit will be able to climb on the motorcycle and ride away.

I gather up the letters and take them over to the lantern to try to read them, but my eyes are so bad, I
cannot see anything but a red blur. "I am taking them back to thewireless hut," I say, and the recruit nods
without looking up.

It is starting to snow. Muller meets me at the door, but I brush past him and turn the flame of the Primus
stove up as high as it will go and hold the letters up behind it.

"I will read them for you," Muller says eagerly, looking through the envelopes I have discarded. "Look,
here is a letter from your mother. Perhaps she has sent your gloves."

I squint at the letters one by one while he tears open my mother's letter to me. Even though I hold them
so close to the flame that the paper scorches, I cannot make out the names.