"Effinger, George Alec - Maureen Birnbaum 03 - Maureen Birnbaum at the Looming Awfulness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

charred rope which I could have obtained anywhere.

Bitsy, have you noticed that my narrative style has become like you know, dated,
clumsy, and ornate? That I'm not talking in the airy colloquial phrases for
which I'm justly celebrated? That is one of the insidious effects of my brash
with . . . the horror. For now, that's the only way I can refer to it. I dare
not name it until I have made the setting clear. Later you will know all, and
you will wish that you did not. It will be my fault if your dreams are troubled
for weeks and months to come, but I know how eagerly you look forward to these
recitations of my courageous endeavors.

It all began in the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University, like the
largest open-stack library in the Free World. I saw your eyes open wider when I
mentioned the college. I suppose as old as you get, you never lose the certainty
that New Haven, Connecticut and Yale University are pretty much Heaven as far as
we Greenberg School girls were concerned. Harvard was too stuffy, Princeton too
rural, but Yale-- and those gallant Yalies! -- was what our education and
training had prepared us for. We were to go forth and charm a Yalie into
marriage; or else, if we failed, we tried to be satisfied with entering
matrimony with, oh, like a family practitioner, as you did.

Be that as it may, in my final (and I do mean like final) attempt to reach the
boffable Prince Van on Mars, I stretched myself out toward Mars; instead, I hit
that library in that university on the north shore of Long Island Sound. I
realized that I was on Earth immediately, of course; I've had other exploits on
Earth, but they've all been with mythical figures or in historical times. Now,
however, I had dropped into the Sterling Memorial Library, and a newspaper there
informed me that it was March 1, 1966.

I worried for a moment. I had whooshed, all right, but I hadn't whooshed very
far in either time or space. This had been happening pretty often lately. The
next time I whoosh, who knows but I may end up only an hour in the past,
standing in my magnificent Amazonian regalia in Rabbi and Mrs. Gold's bedroom
four houses down the block.

Did this mean that my career as the premier female swordsperson and all-around
savior of men and women in distress had come to an end? Was I like stuck here,
in the recent past in New Haven, forever? Well, it could have been worse. I
could have journeyed back to Mars and discovered that Prince Van broke our dates
all the time and never called the next day. He might have been interested in One
Thing and One Thing only, something I wouldn't like give up easily even to him.
He might have wanted the two of us to go live with his mother, the queen, for
God's sake.

I guess that as the years passed, and as my failures to return to Mars became
embarrassingly numerous, my once-vivid memories of the glorious Prince Van began
to fade. Also, I'd begun to suspect that the handsome prince didn't want to be
found, and that I'd been put on some kind of interplanetary Hold or something.

Further, I might mention, I'd met another young man early in my adventures, a