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

artillery staff's headquarters. It is not very far, but it is snowing and my hands are already cold. I go to the
quartermaster's and ask him if the mail has come in.

There is a new recruit there, trying to fix Eisner's motorcycle. He has parts spread out on the ground all
around him in a circle. He points to a burlap sack and says, "That is all the mail there is. Look through it
yourself."

Snow has gotten into the sack and melted. The ink on the envelopes has run, and I squint at them, trying
to make out the names. My eyes begin to hurt. There is not a package from my mother or a letter from
my professor, but there is a letter for Lieutenant Schwarzschild. The return address says "Doctor."
Perhaps he has written to a doctor himself.

"I am delivering a message to the artillery headquarter," I say, showing the letter to the recruit. "I will take
this up> too." The recruit nods and goes on working.

It has gotten dark while I was inside, and it is snowing harder. I jam my hands in the ice-stiff pockets of
my coat and start to the artillery headquarters in the rear. It is pitch-dark in the communication trenches,
and the wind twists the snow and funnels it howling along them. I take off my muffler and wrap it around
my hands like a girl's muff.

A band of red shifts uneasily all along the horizon, but I do not know if it is the front or Muller's northern
lights, and there is no shelling to guide me. We are running out of shells, so we do not usually begin
shelling until nine o'clock. The Russians start even later. Sometimes I hear machine-gun fire, but it is
distorted by the wind and the snow, and I cannot tell what direction it is coming from.

The communication trench seems narrower and deeper than I remember it from when Hans and I first
brought the wireless up. It takes me longer than I think it should to get to the branching that will lead
north to the headquarters. The front has been contracting, the ammunition dumps and officer's billets and
clearing stations moving up closer and closer behind us. The artillery headquarters has been moved up
from the village to a dugout near the artillery line, not half a mile behind us. The nightly firing is starting. I
hear a low rumble, like thunder.

The roar seems to be ahead of me, and I stop and look around, wondering if I can have gotten somehow
turned around, though I have not left the trenches. I start again, and almost immediately I see the
branching and the headquarters.

It has no door, only a blanket across the opening, and I pull my hands free of the muffler and duck
through it into a tiny space like a rabbit hole, the timber balks of the earthen ceiling so low I have to
stoop. Now that I am out of the roar of the snow, the sound of the front separates itself into the individual
crack of a four-pounder, the whine of a star shell, and under it the almost continuous rattle of machine
guns. The trenches must not be as deep here. Muller and I can hardly hear the front at all in our wireless
hut.

A man is sitting at an uneven table spread with papers and books. There is a candle on the table with a
red glass chimney, or perhaps it only looks that way to me. Everything in the dugout, even the man, looks
faintly red.

He is wearing a uniform but no coat, and gloves with the finger ends cut off, even though there is no stove
here. My hands are already cold.