"Timothy Zahn - Cascade Point and Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

step toward the form, and as I did so my foot hit a small pile of gravel, scattering it
noisily.

The "body" twitched and sat up abruptly, and I suddenly found myself
looking at a strikingly lovely woman wrapped up to her chin in a blanket. "Who's
there?" she called timidly, staring in my direction.

I froze in panic, waiting for her inevitable reaction to my face, and silently
cursed myself for being so careless. It was far too late to run or even turn my head;
she was looking straight at me.

But the expected look of horror never materialized. "Who's there?" she
repeated, and only then did I notice that her gaze was actually a little to my right.
Then I understood.

She was blind.

It says a lot for my sense of priorities that my first reaction was one of relief
that she couldn't see me. Only then did it occur to me how cruelly rough postwar
life must be for her with such a handicap. "It's all right," I called out, starting
forward again. "I won't hurt you."

She turned slightly so that she was facing me—keying on my voice and
footsteps, I presume—and waited until I had reached her before speaking again.
"Can you tell me where I am? I'm trying to find a town called Hemlock."

"You've got another five miles to go," I told her. Up close, she wasn't as
beautiful as I'd first thought. Her nose was a little too long and her face too
angular; her figure—what I could see of it beneath the blanket and mismatched
clothing—was thin instead of slender. But she was still nice-looking, and I felt
emotions stirring within me which I thought had died years ago.

"Are there any doctors there?"

"Only a vet, but he does reasonably well with people, too." I frowned,
studying the fatigue in her face, something I'd assumed was just from her journey.
Now I wasn't so sure. "Do you feel sick?"

"A little, maybe. But I mostly need the doctor for a friend who's up the road a
few miles. We were traveling from Chilhowie and he came down with
something." A chill shook her body and she tightened her grip on the blanket.

I touched her forehead. She felt a little warm. "What were his symptoms?"
 "Headache, fever, and a little nausea at first. That lasted about a day. Then his
muscles started to hurt and he began to get dizzy spells. It wasn't more than an
hour before he couldn't even stand up anymore. He told me to keep on going and
see if I could find a doctor in Hemlock."

"When did you leave him?"