"Robert F. Young - Invitation to the Waltz" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

the same reddish radiance that permeated the corridor. There was a bureau, a chair, a washstand and a
bed. The bed was empty. Inset in the ceiling directly above it was a large rectangular mirror.
He returned to the balcony and tried the next door. When it did not give he drew his raze pistol and
incinerated the lock. He went inside. The scene was a facsimile of the one he had just viewed. Except for
the rotted clothing draped over the back of the chair
Except for the bones on the bed.
They comprised two intermingled skeletons. The ribs of the upper, larger one were entangled with
the ribs of the lower, smaller one. The two skulls lay side by side on the rotted pillow, one face down, the
other grinning up into the mirror, as though amused by what it saw.
D'etoile tried three more doors. Two were unlocked and gave into rooms that told him nothing. He
burned through the third and found two more skeletons. They lay facing each other on the bed. The right
femur and tibia of the smaller rested across the left innominate bone of the larger bone of the larger,
phalanxes dangling in the red gloom.
Old Whore-Mother Earth.
D'etoile went looking for the control room. He found it finally. It was above the crimson corridor, at
the top of a narrow spiral stairway that began just to the right of the inner-lock. He had failed to discover
it earlier because the door that gave access to it was indistinguishable, at first glance, from the wall.
Another skeleton — indubitably that of the pilot — greeted him when he entered the room. He
ignored it as best he could and searched for the station's log. When he found it, it told him the whole
grisly story.
Sickened, he descended the stairway, re-emerged in the corridor. In the ballroom, a new waltz had
begun. He knew he should depart at once, but he did not: instead, he returned to the ballroom and
resumed watching the waltzers with the same ambivalence.
Somehow he was not surprised when she emerged from the shadows on the far side of the room. In
a way he had known all along that she was there. Waiting. She came walking toward him across the
crowded floor. Tall, white-gowned, stately. Her black hair, heaped high on her head, gleamed in the
spectral light. Her blood-red mouth accentuated the stark whiteness of her face. Her eyes held the
blackness of metagalactic space.
She held out her hands to him. "Shall we dance?”

They danced. To the waltz that had just begun. To Wein, Weib und Gesang, by Strauss.
They whirled among the ghosts, through them; he, awkward in his spacesuit, she, light as the air she
was made of, yet somehow substantial in his arms.
She said, laughing, "My name is Treponema Pallidum."
He said, shuddering, "I know."
She said, "In space, I came into my own."
He said, "I know."
The barred-spiral nebula above them shifted to the red end of the spectrum. She said, whirling with
him in the incarnadine gloom, "I mutated. I grew stronger and more virulent. I became capable of
accomplishing overnight what once had taken me years. I mastered intercorporeal flight. I acquired the
ability to remain dormant for millennia."
He said, "I know."
She said, "The Space Authority quarantined the station and dispatched an epidemiologist to seek me
out and destroy me. He tried every antibiotic and every drug he knew. He even tried mercury and
Salvarsan."
He said, "I know."
She said, "When he failed, he ordered the pilot to de-orbit and destruct. But I had already reached
the pilot. Now, I got to the epidemiologist. The pilot managed to de-orbit just before he died. The
epidemiologist jettisoned himself." She grinned. "I invited everyone who remained to the waltz. And now
I've invited you."