"Cory Doctorow - A Place So Foreign" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dodd Christina)

stacked to the rafters, until they had revealed a triple-bolted door that looked
new and sturdy, fresh-sawn edges still bright and yellow, and not the weathered
brown of the rest of the barn.

Pa took a key ring out of his vest pocket and unlocked the door, then swung it
open. Each of us shouldered our bags and walked through, in eerie silence, into
a pitch black room.

Pa reached out and pulled the door shut, then there was a sharp click and we
were in 1975.

#

1975 was a queer sight. Our apartment was a lozenge of silver, spoked into the
hub of a floating null-gee doughnut. Pa did something fancy with his hands and
the walls went transparent, and I swear, I dropped to the floor and hugged the
nubby rubber tiles for all I was worth. My eyes were telling me that we were
hundreds of yards off the ground, and while I'd jumped from the rafters of the
horsebarn into the hay countless times, I suddenly discovered that I was afraid
of heights.

After that first dizzying glimpse of 1975, I kept my eyes squeezed shut and held
on for all I was worth. After a minute or two of this, my stomach told me that I
wasn't falling, and I couldn't hear any rushing wind, any birdcalls, anything


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except Mama and Pa laughing, fit to bust. I opened one eye and snuck a peek. My
folks were laughing so hard they had to hold onto each other to stay up, and
they were leaning against thin air, Pa's back pressed up against nothing at all.

Cautiously, I got to my feet and walked over to the edge. I extended one finger
and it bumped up against an invisible wall, cool and smooth as glass in winter.

"James," said my Pa, smiling so wide that his thick moustache stretched all the
way across his face, "welcome to 1975."

#

Pa's ambassadorial mission meant that he often spent long weeks away from home,
teleporting in only for Sunday dinner, the stink of aliens and distant worlds
clinging to him even after he washed up. The last Sunday dinner I had with him,
Mama had made mashed potatoes and corn bread and sausage gravy and turkey,
spending the whole day with the wood-fired cooker back in 1898 (actually, it was
1901 by then, but I always thought of it as 1898). She'd moved the cooker into
the horsebarn after a week of wrestling with the gadgets we had in our 1975
kitchen, and when Pa had warned her that the smoke was going to raise questions
in New Jerusalem, she explained that she was going to run some flexible exhaust