"Asimov, Isaac - Wonderful Worlds of SciFi Vol 9 - Robots" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

He felt her hand burrowing into his pocket.
"I put the price of the meal into your pocket," she whispered conspiratorially. "Please do that for me, won't you? I mean I'd appreciate it if you'd pay the waiter--I'm old-fashioned about things like that."
She smiled meltingly, then became mock-businesslike. "But you must take the money," she insisted. "Why, you're letting Feckle off lightly if you do! You could sue them for every nickel they've got, disturbing your sleep like that."
With a dizzy feeling. as though he had just seen someone make a rabbit disappear into a top hat, he said, "Why, it really wasn't so bad, uh, April. A little noisy, maybe, but--"
"Oh, Mr. Burckhardt!" The blue eyes were wide and admiring. "I knew you'd understand. It's just that--well, it's such a wonderful freezer that some of the outside men get carried away, so to speak. As soon as the main office found out about what happened, they sent representatives around to every house on the block to apologize. Your wife told us where we could phone you--and I'm so very pleased that you were willing to let me have lunch with you, so that I could apologize, too. Because truly, Mr. Burckhardt, it is a fine freezer.
"I shouldn't tell you this, but--" The blue eyes were shyly lowered--"I'd do almost anything for Feckle Freezers. It's more than a job to me." She looked up. She was enchanting. "I bet you think I'm silly, don't you?"
Burckhardt coughed. "Well, I--"
"Oh, you don't want to be unkind!" She shook her head. "No, don't pretend. You think it's silly. But really, Mr. Burckhardt, you wouldn't think so if you knew more about the Feckle. Let me show you this little booklet--"
Burckhardt got back from lunch a full hour late. It wasn't only the girl who delayed him. There had been a curious interview with a little man named Swanson, whom he barely knew, who had stopped him with desperate urgency on the street--and then left him cold.
But it didn't matter much. Mr. Barth, for the first time since Burckhardt had worked there, was out for the day--leaving Burckhardt stuck with the quarterly tax returns.
What did matter, though, was that somehow he had signed a purchase order for a twelve-cubic-foot Feckle Freezer, upright model, self-defrosting, list price $625, with a ten per cent "courtesy" discount--"Because of that horrid affair this morning, Mr. Burckhardt," she had said.
And he wasn't sure how he could explain it to his wife.

He needn't have worried. As he walked in the front door, his wife said almost immediately, "I wonder if we can't afford a new freezer, dear. There was a man here to apologize about that noise and--well, we got to talking and--"
She had signed a purchase order, too.
It had been the damnedest day, Burckhardt thought later, on his way up to bed. But the day wasn't done with him yet. At the head of the stairs, the weakened spring in the electric light switch refused to click at all. He snapped it back and forth angrily and, of course, succeeded in jarring the tumbler out of its pins. The wires shorted and every light in the house went out.
"Damn!" said Guy Burckhardt.
"Fuse?" His wife shrugged sleepily. "Let it go till the morning, dear."
Burckhardt shook his head. "You go back to bed. I'll be right along."
It wasn't so much that he cared about fixing the fuse, but he was too restless for sleep. He disconnected the bad switch with a screwdriver, tumbled down into the black kitchen, found the flashlight and climbed gingerly down the cellar stairs. He located a spare fuse, pushed an empty trunk over to the fuse box to stand on and twisted out the old fuse.
When the new one was in, he heard the starting click and steady drone of the refrigerator in the kitchen overhead.
He headed back to the steps, and stopped.
Where the old trunk had been, the cellar floor gleamed oddly bright. He inspected it in the flashlight beam. It was metal!
"Son of a gun," said Guy Burckhardt. He shook his head unbelievingly. He peered closer, rubbed the edges of the metallic patch with his thumb and acquired an annoying cut--the edges were sharp.
The stained cement floor of the cellar was a thin shell. He found a hammer and cracked it off in a dozen spots--everywhere was metal.
The whole cellar was a copper box. Even the cement-brick walls were false fronts over a metal sheath!
Baffled, he attacked one of the foundation beams. That, at least, was real wood. The glass in the cellar windows was real glass.
He sucked his bleeding thumb and tried the base of the cellar stairs. Real wood. He chipped at the bricks under the oil burner. Real bricks. The retaining walls, the floor--they were faked.
It was as though someone had shored up the house with a frame of metal and then laboriously concealed the evidence.
The biggest surprise was the upside-down boat hull that blocked the rear half of the cellar, relic of a brief home-workshop period that Burckhardt had gone through a couple of years before. From above, it looked perfectly normal. Inside, though, where there should have been thwarts and seats and lockers, there was a mere tangle of braces, rough and unfinished.
"But I built that!" Burckhardt exclaimed, forgetting his thumb. He leaned against the hull dizzily, trying to think this thing through. For reasons beyond his comprehension, someone had taken his boat and his cellar away, maybe his whole house, and replaced them with a clever mock-up of the real thing.
"That's crazy," he said to the empty cellar. He stared around in the light of the flash. He whispered, "What in the name of Heaven would anybody do that for?"
Reason refused an answer; there wasn't any reasonable answer. For long minutes, Burckhardt contemplated the uncertain picture of his own sanity.
He peered under the boat again, hoping to reassure himself that it was a mistake, just his imagination. But the sloppy, unfinished bracing was unchanged. He crawled under for a better look, feeling the rough wood incredulously. Utterly impossible!
He switched off the flashlight and started to wriggle out. But he didn't make it. In the moment between the command to his legs to move and the crawling out, he felt a sudden draining weariness flooding through him.
Consciousness went--not easily, but as though it were being taken away, and Guy Burckhardt was asleep.

On the morning of June 16th, Guy Burckhardt woke up in a cramped position huddled under the hull of the boat in his basement--and raced upstairs to find it was June 15th.
The first thing he had done was to make a frantic, hasty inspection of the boat hull, the faked cellar floor, the imitation stone. They were all as he had' remembered them, all completely unbelievable.
The kitchen was its placid, unexciting self. The electric clock was purring soberly around the dial. Almost six o'clock, it said. His wife would be waking at any moment.
Burckhardt flung open the front door and stared out into the quiet street. The morning paper was tossed carelessly against the steps, and as he retrieved it, he noticed that this was the 15th day of June.
But that was impossible. Yesterday was the 15th of June. It was not a date one would forget, it was quarterly tax-return day.
He went back into the hall and picked up the telephone; he dialed for Weather Information, and got a well-modulated chant: "--and cooler, some showers. Barometric pressure thirty point zero four, rising... United States Weather Bureau forecast for June 15th. Warm and sunny, with high around--"
He hung the phone up. June 15th.
"Holy Heaven!" Burckhardt said prayerfully. Things were very odd indeed. He heard the ring of his wife's alarm and bounded up the stairs.
Mary Burckhardt was sitting upright in bed with the terrified, uncomprehending stare of someone just waking out of a nightmare.
"Oh!" she gasped, as her husband came in the room, "Darling, I just had the most terrible dream! It was like an explosion and--"
"Again?" Burckhardt asked, not very sympathetically, "Mary, something's funny! I knew there was something wrong all day yesterday and--"
He went on to tell her about the copper box that was the cellar, and the odd mock-up someone had made of his boat. Mary looked astonished, then alarmed, then placatory and uneasy,
She said, "Dear, are you sure? Because I was cleaning that old trunk out just last week and I didn't notice anything."