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

The taxi came and Nina slipped gingerly inside. The two men followed, and the taxi shot off into the sky. Below them, the lights of Detroit sparkled and winked, evenly-spaced stars in a man-made firmament. Fresh night air swirled into the cabin of the taxi, a harsh but reviving wind that helped clear Cussick's head. Presently Kaminski seemed to recover a trifle.

"Your husband and I haven't been doing so well, lately," he told Nina: a belated apology. "You've probably noticed."

Nina nodded.

"We're falling apart. The strain . . ." He grimaced. "It isn't easy to watch everything you stand for falling apart piece by piece. One brick after another."

"The graphs still going up?" Cussick asked.

"Straight up. Every region, every stratum. He's getting through to everybody ... a cross-section. How the hell can we isolate a thing like that? There's gasoline frying on every street corner in the world."

Nina said thoughtfully: "Does that surprise you?"

"It's illegal," Kaminski retorted, with childish venom. "They have no right to kill those things."

The woman's thin, pencilled eyebrows went up. "Do you really care about those--lumps?"

"No," Kaminski admitted. "Of course not. I wish they'd all sizzle into the sun. And neither does he; nobody cares about the drifters one way or another."

"How strange," Nina said, in a carefully modulated voice. "Millions of people are resentful, willing to break the law to show their resentment, and you say nobody cares."

"Nobody that counts," Kaminski said, losing all sense of what he was saying: "Just the dupes care, the idiots Jones knows and we know--the drifters are a means, not an end. They're a rallying point, a pretext. We're playing a game, a big elaborate game." Wearily, he muttered: "God, I hate it."

"Then," Nina said practically, "stop playing it."

Kaminski brooded. "Maybe you're right. Sometimes I think that; times when I'm working away, buried in graphs and reports. It's an idea."

"Let them burn the drifters," Cussick said, "and then what? Is that the end of it?"

"No." Kaminski nodded reluctantly, "Of course not. Then the real business begins. Because the drifters aren't here; only a few of them are in our system. They come from somewhere; they have a point of origin."

"Beyond the dead eight," Nina said enigmatically.

Aroused from his lethargy, Kaminski pulled himself around to peer at the woman. Shrewd, wrinkled face dark with suspicion, he was still studying her when the taxi began to lower. Nina opened her purse and found a fifty-dollar bill.

"Here we are," she said shortly. "You can come inside if you want. Or you can wait here--it'll only take a second."

"I'll come inside," Kaminski said, visibly not wanting to be left alone. "I'd like to see your child . . . I've never seen him." As he fumbled for the door he muttered uncertainly: "Have I?"

"No," Cussick answered, deeply struck by his aging instructor's deterioration. Carefully, he reached past Kaminski and opened the taxi door. "Come on inside and get warm."


The living room of the apartment lit up in anticipation as Nina pushed open the front door. From the bedroom came a bubbling, aggravated wail; Jackie was awake and cross.

"Is he all right?" Cussick asked anxiously. "Isn't that thing working?"

"He's probably hungry," Nina answered, taking off her coat and tossing it over a chair. "I'll go heat up his bottle." Skirt swirling around her ankles, she disappeared down the hall into the kitchen.

"Sit down," Cussick said.