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

Sussmann's expression fused over and became opaque. He shook his head.

In the parlor, Carol, Everett's wife AmyтАФan ample, gray woman, rather like somebody's
archetypical aunt but possessed of a very canny mindтАФand Sussmann, the inveterate bachelor, occupied
themselves by playing with Chris. Chris was two, very quick and bright, and very excited by all the
company. He'd just learned how to blow kisses, and was now practicing enthusiastically with the adults.
Everett, meanwhile, was prowling around examining the stereo equipment that filled one wall. "You install
this yourself?" he asked, when Jacobs came up to hand him a beer.

"Not only installed it," Jacobs said, "I built it all myself, from scratch. Tinkered up most of the junk in
this house. Take the beah 'fore it gets hot."
 "Damn fine work," Everett muttered, absently accepting the beer. "Better'n my own setup, I purely
b'lieve, and that set me back a right sma't piece of change. Jesus Christ, BenтАФI didn't know you could
do quality work like that. What the hell you doing stagnating out here in the sticks, fixing people's radios
and washing machines, f'chrissake? Y'that good, you ought to be down in Boston, New York mebbe,
making some real money."

Jacobs shook his head. "Hate the cities, big cities like that. C'n't stand to live in them at all." He ran a
hand through his hair. "I lived in New York for a while, seven-eight yeahs back, 'fore settling in
Skowhegan again. It was terrible theah, even back then, and it's worse now. People down theah dying
on their feet, walking around dead without anybody to tell 'em to lie down and get buried decent."

"We're dying here too, Ben," Everett said. "We're just doing it slower, is all."

Jacobs shrugged. "Mebbe so," he said. "'Scuse me." He walked back to the kitchen, began to scrape
the dishes and stack them in the sink. His hands had started to tremble again.

When he returned to the parlor, after putting Chris to bed, he found that conversation had almost
died. Everett and Sussmann were arguing halfheartedly about the Factory, each knowing that he'd never
convince the other. It was a pointless discussion, and Jacobs did not join it. He poured himself a glass of
beer and sat down. Amy hardly noticed him; her usually pleasant face was stern and angry. Carol found
an opportunity to throw him a sympathetic wink while tossing her long hair back over her shoulder, but
her face was flushed too, and her lips were thin. The evening had started off well, but it had soured
somehow; everyone felt it. Jacobs began to clean his pipe, using a tiny knife to scrape the bowl. A siren
went by outside, wailing eerily away into distance. An ambulance, it sounded like, or the fire-rescue truck
againтАФmore melancholy and mournful, less predatory than the siren of a police cruiser. "тАж brew viruses
тАж" Everett was saying, and then Jacobs lost him, as if Everett were being pulled further and further away
by some odd, local perversion of gravity, his voice thinning into inaudibility. Jacobs couldn't hear him at
all now. Which was strange, as the parlor was only a few yards wide. Another siren. There were a lot of
them tonight; they sounded like the souls of the dead, looking for home in the darkness, unable to find
light and life. Jacobs found himself thinking about the time he'd toured Vienna, during "recuperative leave"
in Europe, after hospitalization in 'Nam. There was a tour of the catacombs under the Cathedral, and he'd
taken it, limping painfully along on his crutch, the wet, porous stone of the tunnel roof closing down until it
almost touched the top of his head. They came to a place where an opening had been cut through the
hard, gray rock, enabling the tourists to come up one by one and look into the burial pit on the other side,
while the guide lectured calmly in alternating English and German. When you stuck your head through the
opening, you looked out at a solid wall of human bones. Skulls, arm and leg bones, rib cages, pelvises, all
mixed in helter-skelter and packed solid, layer after uncountable layer of them. The wall of bones rose up
sheer out of the darkness, passed through the fan of light cast by a naked bulb at eye-level, and
continued to riseтАФit was impossible to see the top, no matter how you craned your neck and squinted.