"Gardner Dozois - Flash Point" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Jacobs turned toward Sussmann. "Wheah you been, this early in the day?" he asked. "A'n't like you
to haul yourself out before noon."

"Up at the Factory. Over to West Mills."

"What was up? Another hearing?"

"Yup. Didn't stickтАФthey aren't going to be injuncted."

"They never will be," Jacobs said. "They got too much money, too many friends in Augusta. The
Board'll never touch them."

"I don't believe that," Sussmann said. Jacobs grunted and sipped his coffee.

"As Christ's my judge," Everett was saying, in a towering rage, "I'll never understand you people, not
if I live to be two hundred, not if I get to be so old my ass falls off and I have to lug it around in a
handcart. I swear to God. Some of you ain' got a pot to piss in, so goddamned poor you can't afford to
buy a bottle of aspirins, let alone, let alone pay your doctor bills from the past half-million years, and yet
you go out to some godforsaken hick town too small to turn a horse around in proper and see an
unlicensed practitioner, a goddamn back-woods quack, an unmitigated phony, and pay through the nose
so this witchdoctor can assault you with yarb potions and poultices, and stick leeches on your ass, for all
I knowтАФ" Jacobs lost track of the conversation. He studied a bee that was bumbling along the
putty-and-plaster edge of the storefront window, swimming through the thick and dusty sunlight, looking
for a way out. He felt numb, distanced from reality. The people around him looked increasingly strange.
He found that it took an effort of will to recognize them at all, even Sussmann, even Everett. It scared
him. These were people Jacobs saw every day of his life. Some of them he didn't actually likeтАФnot in
the way that big-city folk thought of liking someoneтАФbut they were all his neighbors. They belonged
here, they were a part of his existence, and that carried its own special intimacy. But today he was
beginning to see them as an intolerant sophisticate from the city might see them: dull, provincial, sunk in an
iron torpor that masqueraded as custom and routine. That was valid, in its way, but it was a grossly
one-sided picture, ignoring a thousand virtues, compensations and kindnesses. But that was the way he
was seeing them. As aliens. As strangers.

Distractedly, Jacobs noticed that Everett and Sussmann were making ready to leave. "No rest for the
weary," Everett was saying, and Jacobs found himself nodding unconsciously in agreement. Swamped by
a sudden rush of loneliness, he invited both men home for dinner that night. They accepted, Everett with
the qualification that he'd have to see what his wife had planned. Then they were gone, and Jacobs found
himself alone at the counter.

He knew that he should have gone back to work also; he had some more jobs to pick up, and a
delivery to make. But he felt very tired, too flaccid and heavy to move, as if some tiny burrowing animal
had gnawed away his bones, as if he'd been hamstrung and hadn't realized it. He told himself that it was
because he was hungry; he was running himself down, as Carol had always said he someday would. So
he dutifully ordered a bowl of chili.

The chili was murky, amorphous stuff, bland and lukewarm. Listlessly, he spooned it up.

No rest for the weary.