"Baker, Kage - Pueblo, Colorado Has the Answers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Baker Kage)

"Sure, Mr. Lynch." She leaned in and took the receiver from him. "What's the number again?" He read it out to her and she dialed it. Abruptly there was a jarring clang on the other end of the line and the number began ringing. She handed the receiver back to him and walked quickly away.
Trying not to listen to his conversation, she stared at the postal wall. Under the LOCAL slot was a decal of the little cartoon figure the Postal Service had used to convince its customers that zip codes were wonderful, convenient and necessary. The years had not worn away his crazy little smile. Mr. Lynch raised his voice, pulling her attention back. He was waving the sphere as though the person on the other end of the line could see it.
"NOPE. NOPE. YESSIR. I THOUGHT IT WAS ON FIRE. SEE, I -- UH HUH. UH-HUH. NO, I DIDN'T. ABOUT THREE INCHES. NOPE. SEE, I THOUGHT -- UH HUH. TWO MONTHS AGO. NO, JUST FLAT DOWN. SEE, WHAT I THOUGHT AT FIRST -- UH HUH. YESSIR. YOU WHAT?"
A pair of tourists came in. They bought a _San Francisco Chronicle_ and a package of Hostess Honeybuns. They were unpleasantly surprised at the price of the newspaper, but went ahead with the purchase anyway. When they walked out, Marybeth glanced over at the phone booth. Mr. Lynch looked happy now, he was smiling and nodding as he scrawled something on the back of the letter.
"OKAY. RIGHT. OKAY. _RELATIVITY CONDENSER_? WHERE DO I FIND THAT? IT'S WHERE? _WHERE_ DID YOU SAY? OH. OKAY." He listened a moment longer and then said, "ALL RIGHT, AND IT'S BEEN A PLEASURE TALKING TO YOU, SIR."
He emerged from the booth, tucking the letter inside his nylon jacket. "I got to go to the market," he told her. "Thanks for your help."
"What did they say about the trap?"
"They think maybe I adjusted it wrong. It's set too small and that's why it's just catching bugs instead of that thing with the chicken feet. Said _that's_ what's carrying the spores, like deer carry that Lyme Tick stuff? They gave me some suggestions, though." He winked at her. "We'll see what's cookin' now!"
He left with an air of importance. Ten minutes later she realized that he'd left the sphere in the phone booth. With some reluctance she retrieved it and walked over to the front window, examining the thing in the light.
Something inside, a vague outline of tiny wings. Yes, that was a moth in there, trapped in a cue ball of etched glass. What happened when you _condensed Relativity?_ Was this a sphere of frozen Time? Could you turn Time into a solid so things got trapped in it? It had no unusual coldness now, no glow. She walked slowly back to the humidor cabinet and sat down, thoughtfully turning the sphere in her hands. A customer came in and paced up and down in front of the magazines, looking for something in particular. Marybeth lifted a little square of plywood set into the floor, revealing the squared cavity in cement that had once held her father's safe. She dropped the sphere inside and covered it again.
"Can I help you find something?" she inquired, standing up.
* * * *
She did not see Mr. Lynch for a week after that. One morning she had just arrived and was unlocking the door when a local customer approached, being tugged along by a Pomeranian in a hurry.
"'Morning, Marybeth!"
"Good morning, Mrs. Foster."
"Say, if those movie people aren't done shooting in your store, do you think they might want to hire any extras? I used to work at RKO back before the war, you know."
She just stared, her hand motionless on the key. "Excuse me?"
"I tell you, it looked just like old times in there! All those beautiful old cars parked along the street outside, too. I saw a De Soto and a Packard just like Jerry used to have. Good-looking kid they had behind the counter -- was that Jason Scott Lee?"
"Yes," she said, for no reason she understood.
"I thought so, but I didn't want to get too close. Will they be shooting again tonight?"
She shook her head. Mrs. Foster looked rueful. "Darn. I knew I should have gone home and gotten my autograph book. Well, she who hesitates is lost. Can I get in there and buy an air mail stamp, honey?"
"Certainly, Mrs. Foster." She woke from her trance and pushed the door open, and reversed the hanging sign to let the town know everything was business as usual. It clearly wasn't, but she didn't know what else to do.
After Mrs. Foster had gone, Marybeth did a quick check of the store. Nothing out of the ordinary; no copies of _Look _or _The Saturday Evening Post_ on the racks. A succession of octogenarians came in for crossword books, laxatives and cigars. A man in a dark suit and sunglasses came in and bought a souvenir: a plastic snow-globe with sparkles instead of snow, swirling around a tiny plastic treasure chest full of clams.
Shortly before noon Mr. Lynch looked hesitantly around the door. His expression was most odd: scared and elated together. He was carrying a small suitcase.
"Why, Mr. Lynch, what's happened?" She stood up.
"Oh, just having my place exterminated," he said casually. "Got to take a hotel room for a couple of days, that's all." He set the suitcase inside the doorway and looked up and down the street before coming the rest of the way in. "You know that trap I sent off for? I got it to work, finally. Got the little bastard, too. It didn't look like any animal to me -- hell, at first I thought it was a circus dwarf or something, but that nice boy from the Government said it was a Giant Rat of Sumatra. It's all froze solid inside one of them glow-balls, only this is a real big one. Took a lot of my corn with it, but I about decided I wasn't going to eat that stuff anyway, not with whatever's wrong with it."
"You mean the -- the whatever it is -- the trap generated a _big_ white sphere." Marybeth glanced involuntarily at the piece of plywood set in the floor.
"That's what I've been telling you!"
"And it caught something that looked to you like a little man."
"Yep. The boy explained about the trap generating a Temporary Field." Marybeth wondered if he meant _Temporal._ "Says it's just like that new equipment that freezes termites. See, those people from Pueblo, Colorado sent some men out here to see if the trap was working okay. They were right there at my trailer this morning, right after I got up. They're going to clean it all up for me, too, even all those bugs I got by mistake. I ask you now, is that thoughtful? And look at this." He lowered his voice and dug in his pants for his wallet. "Look here!" He pulled out and fanned three twenty-dollar bills. "That's to pay for my hotel room. Now, then. Do they know how to treat an old soldier or do they know how to treat an old soldier?"
The only thing she managed to say was, "I don't think you can get two nights for sixty dollars at this time of year, Mr. Lynch. Except maybe over at the Beachcomber."
"The Beachcomber will do me fine," he asserted. "Hell, I don't need the frills. I need to buy a toothbrush and some toiletries from you, though. They said I couldn't use mine any more. Too many rodent genes from the extermination."
"You don't mean _roentgens, _do you?" She thought about the UFO articles she'd read.
"Yeah! That was it." He looked cheerful. "And I got to go get some underwear at the Thrift Shop, too."
"O-okay." She helped him find a new toothbrush, as well as a can of tooth powder and a tube of Burma-Shave, and rang up his purchases on the cash register. When he had limped out in triumph, she leaned down and lifted the piece of plywood. The sphere was exactly where she had put it, and it was not glowing. Another customer came in. She let the plywood drop back into place.
* * * *
After she had locked up that night, she walked up Hinds Avenue as far as the corner of the old state highway, where she could get a good view south to the edges of the dunes. She saw nothing out of the ordinary, and didn't know what she'd expected to see: a glowing white sphere the size of the Hollywood Cinerama Dome, maybe, with scores of hapless trailer park residents trapped in an eternal _Now _inside? As she walked back down in the direction of her parent's house, a baby blue 1958 Lincoln Continental zoomed up past her, radio playing loud. It sounded like it was playing _That'll Be The Day_. Not the Linda Ronstadt version, though.
* * * *
After dinner she opened the kitchen drawers and poked through them.
"Mom? Don't we have a pair of kitchen tongs?"
"They're in there somewhere." Her mother's voice drifted over the back of the sofa.
She found them at last, and took them to the front hall with a plastic grocery bag. Slipping on a sweater, she reached for her keys.
"Are you going out?" inquired her mother sleepily.
"Just down to the store. I think I left my book."
It was cold on the front porch, and the little figure in flowered pajamas was shivering as she looked up at the stars. She was waiting for one to fall out of the sky, Marybeth remembered; and she almost stepped forward and advised herself to go inside, because the stars would never come within reach. She was not a cruel woman by nature, however, so she just stared fixedly at the child until she vanished, and then moved carefully past the place where she had been, down the steps into the street.
Kon-Tiki Liquors was still open as she crossed the street, but the red and yellow neon beer signs were being shut off one by one. The rest of the town was dark and silent. She experienced a peculiar disappointment as she came around the corner and found her parent's store as dark and silent as the rest. Well, better safe than sorry. She unlocked it, stepped inside and turned to lock the door behind her.
When she turned back, the counter was bathed in daylight, and her young father (God, he _had _looked like Jason Scott Lee) was having a conversation with a stranger in a red Hawaiian shirt.
_Man, oh, man, they must have been going a hundred miles an hour_, the stranger was moaning. Her father was nodding in agreement. _And they say he probably couldn't even see them in the dusk. Believe you me, that is one dangerous intersection even in broad daylight._ He stubbed out a cigarette under the counter. She drew a deep breath and edged past them. Her father barely glanced at her. _Honey, the new issues of Holiday Magazine came in._
"Okay. Thanks," she said, guessing that the ball of concentrated Time was doing more than warping the temporal flow around itself; Past and Present were becoming interactive. She leaned down to prize up the square of plywood. The sphere was glowing in there like a light bulb. She reached in with the kitchen tongs and pulled it out, and dropped it into the grocery bag. It flickered and went out, and when it did the daylight vanished and she was alone in the darkness of the store.
Out on Pomeroy Street again, she paused and wondered what to do next. After considering a number of possibilities, she walked over two blocks to the empty lot where the C-Air Motor Hotel had been before it burned down in 1966. A rusted standpipe protruded from a patch of cracked pink tiles there, nearly hidden by weeds. Using the tongs, she dropped the sphere into the pipe. She heard it rattling down into darkness. She dropped the tongs in after it and then wadded up the plastic bag and jammed that in too. Maybe the lead in the pipe would somehow shield against the temporal distortion. Or not; maybe it was an iron pipe. In any case, there was nothing she could do about it now. She walked home quickly and washed her hands as soon as she got in.