"Avram Davidson - The House the Blakeneys Built" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

Hayakawa, with a polite gesture, turned away from the recitation. "Ezra тАж I
think we might be able to fix all this. Get it in running order. That would be
something to do, wouldn't it? Something well worth doing. It would make a big
difference.

Ezra said that it would make all the difference.

Shulamith's child, a girl, was born on the edge of a summer evening when the
sun streaked the sky with rose, crimson, magenta, lime, and purple. "We'll
name her Hope," she said.

"Tongs to make tongs," Mikicho called the work of repair. She saw the
restoration of the water-power as the beginning of a process which must
eventually result in their being spaceborne again. Robert and Ezra did not
encourage her in this. It was a long labor of work. They pored and sifted
through The House from its crumbling top to its vast, vast colonnaded cellar,
finding much that was of use to them, much whichтАФthough of no useтАФwas
interesting and intriguingтАФand much which was not only long past use but whose
very usage could now be no more than a matter of conjecture. They found tools,
metal which could be forged into tools, they found a whole library of books
and they found the Blakeney-made press on which the books had been printed;
the most recent was a treatise on the diseases of cattle, its date little more
than a hundred years earlier. Decay had come quickly.

None of the Blakeneys were of much use in the matter of repairs. They were
willing enough to lift and moveтАФuntil the novelty wore off; then they were
only in the way. The nearest to an exception was Big Fat Red Bob, the
blacksmith; and, as his usual work was limited to sharpening plowshares, even
he was not of much use. Robert and Ezra worked from sunrise to late afternoon.
They would have worked longer, but as soon as the first chill hit the air,
whatever Blakeneys were on hand began to get restless.

"Have's to get back, now, a hey. Have's to start back."

"Why?" Ezra had asked, at first. "There are no harmful animals on
Blakeneyworld, are there?"

It was nothing that any of them could put into words, either clearsound or
mumbletalk. They had no tradition of things that go bump in the night, but
nothing could persuade them to spend a minute of the night outside the thick
walls of The House. Robert and Ezra found it easier to yield, return with
them. There were so many false starts, the machinery beginning to function and
then breaking down, that no celebration took place to mark any particular day
as the successful one. The nearest thing to it was the batch of cakes that Old
Big Mary baked from the first millground flour.

"Like longlong times," she said, contentedly, licking crumbs from her
toothless chops. She looked at the newcomers, made a face for their baby. A
thought occurred to her, and, after a moment or two, she expressed it. "Not