"Dick, Philip K - Now Wait for Last Year v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

'Please,' Kathy said. 'Don't lecture me. What did it say? That I'm building a Pitts-39? It lied; I got the Lucky Strike green package as a gift. I wouldn't build a babyland without telling you; after all, it would be yours, too.'


'Not Pitts-39,' Eric said. 'I never lived there, in '39 or any other time.' He seated himself at his desk and punched the viscombox. 'I'm here, Mrs Sharp,' he informed Virgil's secretary. 'How are you today, Mrs Sharp? Get home all right from that war-bond rally last night? No warmongering pickets hit you on the head?' He shut off the box. To Kathy he explained, 'Lucile Sharp is an ardent appeaser. I think it's nice for a corporation to permit its employees to engage in political agitation, don't you? And even nicer than that is the fact that it doesn't cost you a cent; political meetings are free.'


Kathy said, 'But you have to pray and sing. And they do get you to buy those bonds.'


'Who was the cigarette package for?'


'Virgil Ackerman, of course.' She exhaled cigarette smoke in twin gray trails. 'You suppose I want to work elsewhere?'


'Sure, if you could do better.'


Kathy said thoughtfully, 'It's not the high salary that keeps me here, Eric, despite what you think. I believe we're helping the war effort.'


'Here? How?'


The office door opened; Miss Perth stood outlined, her luminous, fuzzy, horizontally inclined breasts brushing the frame as she turned toward him and said, 'Oh, doctor, sorry to bother you but Mr Jonas Ackerman is here to see you Ц Mr Virgil's great-grandnephew from the Baths.'


'How are the Baths, Jonas?' Eric said, holding out his hand; the great-grandnephew of the firm's owner came toward him and they shook in greeting. 'Anything bubble out during the night shift?'


'If it did,' Jonas said, 'it imitated a workman and left by the front gate.' He noticed Kathy then. 'Morning, Mrs Sweetscent. Say, I saw that new config you acquired for our Wash-35, that bug-shaped car. What is that, a Volkswagen? Is that what they were called?'


'An air-flow Chrysler,' Kathy said. 'It was a good car but it had too much unsprung metal in it. An engineering error that ruined it on the market.'


'God,' Jonas said, with feeling. To know something really thoroughly; how that must feel. Down with the fliegemer Renaissance Ц I say specialize in one area untilЧ' He broke off, seeing that both the Sweetscents had a grim, taciturn cast about them. 'I interrupted?'


'Company business takes priority,' Eric said, 'over the creature pleasures.' He was glad of the intervention by even this junior member of the organization's convoluted blood hierarchy. 'Please scram out of here, Kathy,' he said to his wife, and did not trouble himself to make his tone jovial. 'We'll talk at dinner. I've got too much to do to spend my time haggling over whether a robant bill collector is mechanically capable of telling lies or not.' He escorted his wife to the office door; she moved passively, without resistance. Softly, Eric said, 'Like everyone else in the world it's busy deriding you, isn't it? They're all talking.' He shut the door after her.


Presently Jonas Ackerman shrugged and said, 'Well, that's marriage these days. Legalized hate.'


'Why do you say that?'


'Oh, the overtones came through in that exchange; you could feel it in the air like the chill of death. There ought to be an ordinance that a man can't work for the same outfit as his wife; hell, even in the same city.' He smiled, his thin, youthful face all at once free of seriousness. 'But she really is good, you know; Virgil gradually let go all his other antique collectors after Kathy started here ... but of course she's mentioned that to you.'