"The World Jones Made" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Laughing, Nina skipped over and hugged him. "You great pompous thing. Taking it all so seriously--what am I going to do with you?"

"I don't know," Cussick admitted, frowning. "What are we going to do with all of us?"

"This thing really bothers you," Nine observed, gazing up into his face, her own blue eyes troubled and serious.

Cussick moved away from her and began assembling the heaps of newspapers scattered around the apartment. Nina watched, subdued and chastened, in her paint-streaked slacks and new nylon bra, feet bare, blonde hair tumbled loosely around her smooth shoulders. "Can you tell me anything about it?" she asked presently.

"Sure," Cussick said. Riffling the newspapers, he pulled one out, folded it, and handed it to her. "You can read about it while you're bathing."

The article was long and prominent.


MINISTER DRAWS CROWDS
FURTHER PROOF OF WORLD-WIDE RELIGIOUS REVIVAL


Citizens flock to hear minister tell of calamities to come. Infiltration by alien life-forms predicted in detail.

Below that was a picture of Jones, but no longer sitting in a platform in a side show. An ordained minister, now, wearing a shabby black frock coat, black shoes, more or less shaved, a Peripatetic preacher roaming about the countryside haranguing crowds of rustics. Nina glanced briefly at it, read a few words, glanced again at the picture, and then, without a word, turned and raced into the bathroom to shut off the water. She didn't return the newspaper; when next she appeared, ten minutes later, the newspaper had vanished.

"What'd you do with it," Cussick asked curiously. He had fairly well straightened up the room and began packing his suitcase.

"The newspaper?" Luminous and steaming from her bath, Nina began searching in the dresser for a fresh slip.

"You don't really give a damn," Cussick said, with irritation.

"What about?"

"The work I'm doing. This whole system."

"Darling, it's none of my business." Tartly, she observed: "After all, it's supposed to be secret . . . I don't want to pry."

"Now listen," he said quietly. Going over to her he uptilted her chin until she had to face him. "Sweetheart," he told her, "you knew what I was doing before you married me. This is no time to disapprove."

For a moment they faced each other defiantly. Then, with a swift dart of her hand, Nina swept up a perfume atomizer from the dresser and squirted him in the face. "Go shave and wash," she ordered him. "And for heaven's sake, put on a clean shirt - there's a whole drawer full of them. I don't want to be ashamed of you."


Below the ship the blue, insipid expanse of the Atlantic lay spread out. Cussick restlessly scowled down at it, and then tried to interest himself in the TV screen glowing from the back of the seat before him. To his right, on the window side of him, dressed in an expensive hand-tailored worsted suit, Nina sat reading a copy of the London Times and daintily nibbling on a wafer-thin Swiss mint.

Moodily getting out his orders, Cussick began restudying the enclosed material. Jones had been arrested at four-thirty a.m. in the downstate section of Illinois, near a town called Pinckneyville. He had put up no resistance, as the police dragged him out of his wooden shack, described, technically, as his "church." Now he was being held in the main processing center at Baltimore. Presumably, a brief had already been drawn up by the Fedgov Attorney General's office; conviction was a matter of routine. There was the necessity of an appearance at the Public Court, and the actual sentencing . . .

"I wonder if he'll remember me," Cussick said aloud.

Nina lowered her Times. "What? I'm sorry, darling. I was reading the report of the scout ship that was grounded on Neptune for a month and three days. Lord, it must be awful out there. Those ice-cold planets, no air and no light, just dead rock."

"They're all useless," Cussick agreed testily. "It's a waste of the taxpayers' money to explore them." He folded up his orders and stuffed them away in his coat pocket.

"What's he like?" Nina asked. "Is he the one you told me about, the one who used to be a fortuneteller?"