"Adams, Douglas - So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

It wasn't that he was naturally predisposed to be so surly, at
least he hoped not. It was just the rain which got him down,
always the rain.

It was raining now, just for a change.

It was a particular type of rain he particularly disliked,
particularly when he was driving. He had a number for it. It was
rain type 17.

He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred
different words for snow, without which their conversation would
probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish
between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow,
sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that
came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your
neighbour's boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows
of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your
childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow,
fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls
in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of
a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that
despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed
on.

Rob McKeena had two hundred and thirty-one different types of
rain entered in his little book, and he didn't like any of them.

He shifted down another gear and the lorry heaved its revs up. It
grumbled in a comfortable sort of way about all the Danish
thermostatic radiator controls it was carrying.

Since he had left Denmark the previous afternoon, he had been
through types 33 (light pricking drizzle which made the roads
slippery), 39 ( heavy spotting), 47 to 51 (vertical light drizzle
through to sharply slanting light to moderate drizzle
freshening), 87 and 88 (two finely distinguished varieties of
vertical torrential downpour), 100 (post-downpour squalling,
cold), all the seastorm types between 192 and 213 at once, 123,
124, 126, 127 (mild and intermediate cold gusting, regular and
syncopated cab-drumming), 11 (breezy droplets), and now his least
favourite of all, 17.

Rain type 17 was a dirty blatter battering against his windscreen
so hard that it didn't make much odds whether he had his wipers
on or off.

He tested this theory by turning them off briefly, but as it
turned out the visibility did get quite a lot worse. It just
failed to get better again when he turned them back on.