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

going up to the front have discarded: water bottles and haversacks and bayonets. Hans and I sometimes
tried to puzzle out why they would discard such important things.
"Perhaps they were too heavy," I would say, though that did not explain the bayonets or the boots.

"Perhaps they know they are going to die," Hans would say, picking up a helmet.

I would try to cheer him up. "My gloves fell out of my pocket yesterday when I went to the
quartermaster's. I never found them. They are in this trench somewhere."

"Yes," he would say, turning the helmet round and round in his hands, "perhaps as they near the front,
these things simply drop away from them."

My theory is that what happens to the water bottles and helmets and bayonets is what has happened to
Muller. He was a student in university before the war, but his knowledge of science and his intelligence
have fallen away from him, and now we are so close to the front, all he has left are his theories. And his
curiosity, which is a dangerous thing to have kept.

"Exactly. Magnets pull iron, and they were carrying barbed wire!" he says triumphantly. "And so they
were pulled in to the magnet."

I put my hands practically into the Primus flame and rub them together, trying to get rid of the numbness.
"We had better get the barretter in the wireless again or this magnet of yours will suck it to the front, too."

I go back to the wireless. Muller stays by the stove, thinking about his magnet. The door bangs open. It
is not a real door, only an iron humpie tied to the beam that reinforces the dugout and held with a wedge,
and when someone pushes against it, it flies inward, bringing the snow with it.

Snow swirls in, and light, and the sound from the front, a low rumble like a dog growling. I clutch the
liquid barretter to my chest, and Muller flings himself over the wireless as if it were a wounded comrade.
Someone bundled in a wool coat and mittens, with a wool cap pulled over his ears, stands silhouetted
against the reddish light in the doorway, blinking at us.

"Is Private Rottschieben here? I have come to see him about his eyes," he says, and I see it is Dr.
Funkenheld.

"Come in and shut the door," I say, still carefully protecting the liquid barretter, but Muller has already
jammed the metal back against the beam.

"Do you have news?" Muller says to the doctor, eager for new facts to spin his theories from. "Has the
wiring fatigue come back? Is there going to be a bombardment tonight?"

Dr. Funkenheld takes off his mittens. "I have come to examine your eyes," he says to me. His voice
frightens me. All through the war he has kept his quiet bedside voice, speaking to the wounded in the
dressing station and at the stretcher bearer's posts as if they were in his surgery in Stuttgart, but now he
sounds agitated, and I am afraid it means a bombardment is coming and he will need me at the front.

When I went to the dressing station for medicine for my eyes, I foolishly told him I had studied medicine
with Dr. Zuschauer in Jena. Now I am afraid he will ask me to assist him, which will mean going up to the
front. "Do your eyes still hurt?" he says.