Читать книгу The Naked Storm - Cyril M. Kornbluth - Страница 5
ОглавлениеBYSTANDERS
I
The wolf was gaunt and shabby; he slunk cringing through the snow, quailing at every blast of wind. He was starving. His ribs showed plainly and his belly drew up tight; he looked grotesquely like the caricature of a greyhound on the buses. He had eaten last a week ago, a sheep cut out from a Colorado rancher's flock and pulled down running. He had gorged on the sheep and awakened from the heavy sleep to find the bones picked by buzzards. The snow had started about then.
He stopped as a familiar, frightening smell permeated the air. It was the complex smell of man and his works. Oil. Gasoline. Cloth. Fire. Whenever that smell had filled the air before it had been followed by loud, inexplicable noises, rushing things moving faster than he could, stones that did not stay in place as stones should but hurtled through the air and thumped him in the ribs or on the nose. As a cub he had learned about that complex smell; it meant trouble and he had stayed away from it.
But he was starving, and part of the complex smell was meat.
With his hackles up and his heart pounding, he inched toward it through the snow. The smell came from a bundle on the ground, and the bundle did not move. His lips drew back as a strain of polecat and another of mink wafted his way. But the bundle did not move, and it smelled also of meat. His caution was consumed by the raging pain in his belly. He leaped on the bundle and tore at it, worrying away strange layers of pelt and cloth. It did not move; it was frozen. He knew what to do with frozen game. He went for the belly with his long, pointed eyeteeth and opened it up. The exposed organs steamed a little in the icy air.
The wolf crouched down and looked about, growling his ownership. There was nobody to dispute it so he began to gnaw at the liver.
He would live through the winter after all.
II
The three men in the hotel room jumped to their feet as the door slammed open.
"Police," a tall man in the doorway announced. Uniformed patrolmen moved around him and began to search the room, picking up papers, briefcases, opening drawers and closets.
The oldest of the three men, bald, wearing a richly conservative brown suit, said: "I suppose you have a warrant."
"Two of them. Search and arrest. Put on your coats and let's go."
The man in the brown suit took a heavy overcoat from a closet and began to wind a muffler around his neck. He asked almost casually: "What's the charge?"
"Conspiracy to violate gambling laws. Let's go."
"May I phone a lawyer?"
"From the station house. Come on."
One of the uniformed men, a sergeant, was carefully removing something bulky from the rear of a high closet shelf. It was a tape recorder, and its reels were still turning. The man in the brown suit raised his eyebrows. He and another of the room's original occupants looked at the third man. He told the third man sadly: "You think you can get away with such goings-on? I'm surprised at you."
The police lieutenant, admitting nothing, nevertheless gave the third man a chin-up glance. Everybody in the room, however, knew that the third man's death warrant had just been signed.
It would be executed some day by means of a speeding truck or a bomb wired to his car's ignition, or a shotgun blast through a window or fists and feet and newspaper-wrapped lead pipe in a deserted place where nobody would hear his screams except his murderers.
It would happen just as soon as they were ready for it to happen, not a minute sooner or later. He would have to use the time that remained to him as efficiently as possible and try not to worry too much.
III
"Phonies," said the cynical bellboy.
"Honeymooners," the romantic chambermaid said firmly.
They were discussing the couple who had checked in last night at the Desert Rest Motel, Nevada.
"'Mr. and Mrs. John Smith,'" the bellboy sneered.
"Look in a phone book, wise guy. Look in any phone book, I dare you. You think there ain't any John Smiths in the whole world?"
"A shack job," said the bellboy. "And she's taking him for plenty. I seen them quiet ones before."
"I," said the chambermaid, "seen the way they look at each other..." She smiled mistily and blinked.
But as a matter of fact they were both right.
IV
The torn corpse in the snow; the doomed, calm betrayer; the happy adulterers who could make a motel chambermaid smile--we must go back one week to begin their story.
