"Philip Jose Farmer - The Sliced Crosswise Only on Tuesday W" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World
by Philip Jos├й Farmer

Getting into Wednesday was almost impossible.
Tom Pym had thought about living on other days of the week. Almost everybody
with any imagination did. There were even TV shows speculating on this. Tom Pym
had even acted in two of these. But he had no genuine desire to move out of his own
world. Then his house burned down.
This was on the last day of the eight days of spring. He awoke to look out the door
at the ashes and the firemen. A man in a white asbestos suit motioned for him to stay
inside. After fifteen minutes, another man in a suit gestured that it was safe. He
pressed the button by the door, and it swung open. He sank down in the ashes to his
ankles; they were a trifle warm under the inch-thick coat of water-soaked crust.
There was no need to ask what had happened, but he did, anyway.
The firemen said, "A short-circuit, I suppose. Actually, we don't know. It started
shortly after midnight, between the time that Monday quit and we took over."
Tom Pym thought that it must be strange to be a fireman or a policeman. Their
hours were so different, even though they were still limited by the walls of midnight.
By then the others were stepping out of their stoners or "coffins" as they were often
called. That left sixty still occupied.
They were due for work at 08:00. The problem of getting new clothes and a place
to live would have to be put off until off-hours, because the TV studio where they
worked was behind in the big special it was due to put on in 144 days.
They ate breakfast at an emergency center. Tom Pym asked a grip if he knew of
any place he could stay. Though the government would find one for him, it might not
look very hard for a convenient place.
The grip told him about a house only six blocks from his former house. A makeup
man had died, and as far as he knew the vacancy had not been filled. Tom got onto the
phone at once, since he wasn't needed at that moment, but the office wouldn't be open
until ten, as the recording informed him. The recording was a very pretty girl with red
hair, tourmaline eyes, and a very sexy voice. Tom would have been more impressed if
he had not known her. She had played in some small parts in two of his shows, and the
maddening voice was not hers. Neither was the color of her eyes.
At noon he called again, got through after a ten-minute wait, and asked Mrs.
Bellefield if she would put through a request for him. Mrs. Bellefield reprimanded him
for not having phoned sooner; she was not sure that anything could be done today. He
tried to tell her his circumstances and then gave up. Bureaucrats! That evening he went
to a public emergency place, slept for the required four hours while the inductive field
speeded up his dreaming, woke up, and got into the upright cylinder of eternium. He
stood for ten seconds, gazing out through the transparent door at other cylinders with
their still figures, and then he pressed the button. Approximately fifteen seconds later
he became unconscious.
He had to spend three more nights in the public stoner. Three days of fall were
gone; only five left. Not that that mattered in California so much. When he had lived
in Chicago, winter was like a white blanket being shaken by a madwoman. Spring was
a green explosion. Summer was a bright roar and a hot breath. Fall was the topple of a
drunken jester in garish motley.
The fourth day, he received notice that he could move into the very house he had
picked. This surprised and pleased him. He knew of a dozen who had spent a whole
year-forty-eight days or so-in a public station while waiting. He moved in the fifth day