"Tom Easton - Down on the Truck Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

sprawled in the wood-and-canvas deck chair, at the honeysuckle blossoms littering the floor around him, at one last
blossom crushed in a sticky hand.

Jimmy wished his older sister were still at home. She would be more sympathetic. But she had gone off to college two
years before, and....

"Hey, Ma!"

It was not their mother who came to the door, one hand holding a glass of water, the other a pair of yellow pills. It was
Dad, tall, thin to the point of gauntness, balding, his face lugubriously sad, his head shaking, his voice tsking, "Sober
up, boy. You're supposed to be helping us get the carpet up. Not...." With the hand that held the pills he gestured
toward the house next door. "You want to wind up like Petra? She lost her son, not just a friend."
Jimmy made a face. Outlaw gengineers had turned the honeysuckle loose upon the world, and no one had been able to
get rid of it since. But the biochemists, as ingenious in their way as the gengineers, had promptly devised an antidote
for the euphoric in the nectar. The yellow pills contained a mixture of that antidote and the much older alcohol
detoxicant. In mere moments, his system was free of both drugs and he was staring longingly once more at the
pumpkin across the way. A best friend was not just a friend.

"C'mon, Jimmy." He shook Caleb's hand off his arm, levered himself out of his low seat, and followed his father into the
living room. For a little while then, he helped move the couch, easy chairs, end tables, books and bookcase, into other
rooms. Then he pried nails from the floorboards, rolled the old, worn carpet into a wormlike cylinder, sneezed at the
dust he stirred, and marveled at the circular marks upon the wood beneath.

His mother blew her nose and ran her fingers across the marks. "Water stains," she said. She was Dad's total opposite,
short, round, her hair thick and blonde. Caleb's hair was like hers. Jimmy's was thinner, drabber, like his father's. "And
ground-in dirt. And just a hair of indentation. Someone had flower pots in here once. Heavy ones."

Jimmy wondered if that someone had been Tommy's father. But that thought evaporated as the carpet company's
delivery van, a Bioblimp, arrived, lifted off the house's roof with its muscular tentacles, and replaced the roll of old
carpet with one of new. He stepped onto the deck once more to watch the van drift down the breeze, not yet using the
propellor mounted on the rear of its crew pod. Its main ancestor had been some simple jellyfish. The gengineers had
vastly enlarged it, swelled it up with hydrogen, given its tentacles muscles that belonged more properly to an octopus
or squid, and equipped it with cargo pockets whose genes had come from kangaroos. Behind him, he could hear his
mother running the vacuum cleaner across the bare floor, removing all the grit and dust that had sifted through and
accumulated beneath the old carpet.

When the new carpet was in place and the furniture was restored to its positions, the whole family took their
seats--Jimmy's mother and Caleb on the couch, Dad in his recliner, Jimmy in the antique wing chair--and admired the
carpet. That was when Dad sighed and said, "Jim. We have got to do something about you."

Jimmy shifted uncomfortably. Caleb snickered until his mother pinched his thigh.

"You've finished school," Dad went on. "At least until you decide to go on. But you don't seem to want a job. And
you're drinking far too much honeysuckle wine."

"Yessir," said Jimmy. He stared at the carpet between his feet, preferring its clean, fresh neutrality to the disapproval of
his parents, or the glee of his little brother.

"If this keeps up," said Dad. "If this goes on, you'll be just another honey-suckin' bum."