"Avram Davidson - The Dive People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

was a pile of clothes. His.

Hangovers are funny only to those who have never really suffered from
them. As he bent, half fainting, half retching, over his clothes, it was
nothing so slight as a splitting headache that Ed Peterson felt, but a
condition in which every cell in his body seemed at war with every other
cell, and all his parts seemed loathsome to him. Closing his eyes, feeling
that they would otherwise burst from their sockets, he got into his clothes.
He had to get out of the apartment before whoever-it-was got out of the
shower.

He had killed a human beingтАФinstinctively he raised his hands: there
was no blood, unless that dark whatever-it-was, half on and half under the
rough loose cuticle of one fingerтАж And on his clothes? Was that spot
thereтАФand the one next to itтАФwere they blood? Or the Chianti of the night
before? Ed didn't know. He had no memory of the latter part of last
evening.

In the subway station, sitting on the hard wooden bench (first he'd
tried to thrust a nickel into the turnstile, thenтАФrecalling vaguely that the
fare had been raisedтАФhe had found a dime and pressed that into the slot,
and finally took both coins to the change booth and been given a token) he
remembered that he did not even recall the location of the house he had
just left. So far as he knew, he had never been in the place before, but he
knew well enough what sort of a place it was: a dive.

Who was it that had been so scornful of "dive people"? Jinny? No, Jinny
was never scornful of anyoneтАФat least, not openly. Pauli? (Ah, God, Pauli!)
They had met in a diveтАФ"Riverside Dive" it had been calledтАФa huge
apartment tenanted jointly (or so it seemed) by several hundred harmless
young men, mostly science-fiction fans, with half a dozen bathrooms and
two score beds.

Yes, Pauli, curling her over-red lips and saying, "Dive people!" Pauli.
Few of the dives, to be sure, were on the level of the one overlooking the
River. Some were converted (or unconverted) lofts, some out-and-out
slums; some made a faltering effort at achieving the more abundant life
via the co-op method, with typewritten menus and duty rosters on the
kitchen bulletin board (WEDNESDAY: Breakfast: Doreen and Jack.
Cleanup: Dickie), and a membership of students or artists or other
pursuers of beautiful dreams. And other dives were sort of pipeless opium
dens, notтАФto be sureтАФscenes of orgies, but places for the restless and
roaming to fall back on for a pad and a pancake if there weren't any orgies
going for the moment. But they all had something in commonтАФthe same
air of insubstantiality, of wary waitfulness, the presence of those who had
turned their backs upon the past and their faces half away from the
futureтАФthe unsuccessfully educated, the believers in nothingтАж
 Not even looking to see where the train was going, Ed crept in and sank
down in a corner. The man nearest him finished his Daily News and
tossed it on the seat, thus by subway law making it public domain; Ed