"Avram Davidson - Blunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

Redund. Prep., Cumberback, Alonso T., Steward's Mate 1/c

Redund.Prep., Williamson, Jno., Officer's Cook, 3/c

Lost in pride, Blunt fell silent and looked at his collection. Row after row,
shelf after shelf, of bottles and jars, lined the large closet. In cold glass
wombs that would forever preserve but never nurture them, floated homunculi, in
every stage of development up to the sixth month -- after that they were always
claimed, though burial (Blunt thought} was a foolish waste. Nobody ever asked
for an appendix; there must have been over a hundred of them. There were
tonsils, tumors, fingers, a few ears, a whole foot, several eyes. Swaying gently
in response to distant vibration was something like a bunch of grapes, labeled
Youlihan, Bette Lou. A shy smile on his lips, Huey reached out and touched with
a gentle finger a bottle containing a twelve-foot tapeworm (Le Maistre,
Cleophile). He rested his hand affectionately on a mason jar that held a scalp
of chestnut colored hair. He cleared his throat.

"I don't suppose that there's another collection such as this in the whole
country, in private hands," he said, in his high, flat voice. "I was hoping..."
He took out a handkerchief, spat onto a comer of it, and rubbed at a speck on a
bottle with a rather faded-looking testicle in it.

"I was hoping that after we were married, after that, then I was hoping that you
and me could sort of catalogue it all, together, Wilma...

"Wilma?"

He walked rapidly through the bungalow with long strides.

"Wilma ? "

But Wilma was already on the bus, bound, not for her home, but for the Station.
She rode in tight-mouthed containment until the Nurses Quarters, where she
allowed herself to be helped off in a state of convulsive hysteria. After being
drenched with aromatic spirits of ammonia, and after weeping her dress and those
of the nurses tending her into quasi-transparency, she retreated with cold
compresses to a darkened room. The nurses, who were fond of her, had watched,
like everyone else at Sick Bay, the slow progress of the courtship. It was
certainly not to be thought that Blunt, of all people, had made improper
advances; they thought that he must have jilted the poor girl; they pressed
sympathetically for Details. They got them, and the account of Wilma's Terrible
Experiences strained through sobs and hiccups, spread almost at once to Sick
Bay; and thence, to the Navy at large, gathering details at every step...

(Pawson, for example, reported to Tester that "Ol' Huey got a closet full o'
pickled coilions, an' a two-headed baby in a jar o' formaldehyde!")

"But what I want to know," said Doctor Wallop, "is she marrying him, or--?