"Jack Finney - Of Missing Persons" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finney Jack)

All of them had, plainly and unmistakably, one quality in common: You knew as you looked at them
that these rooms were home, really home, to the people who lived in them. On the wall of one living
room, over the stone fireplace, hung a hand-stiched motto; it said, "There Is No Place Like Home," but
the words didn't seem quaint or amusing, they didn't seem old-fashioned, resurrected or copied from a
past that was gone. They seemed real; they belonged; those words were nothing more or less than a
simple expression of true feeling and fact.
 "Who are you?" I lifted my head from the folder to stare into the man's eyes.

He lighted his pipe, taking his time, sucking the match flame down into the bowl, eyes glancing up at
me. "It's in the text," he said then, "on the back page. WeтАФthat is to say, the people of Verna, the
original inhabitantsтАФare people like yourself. Verna is a planet of air, sun, land, and sea, like this one.
And of the same approximate temperature. So life evolved there, of course, just about as it has here,
though rather earlier; and we are people like you. There are trivial anatomical differences, but nothing
important. We read and enjoy your James Thurber, John Clayton, Rabelais, Allen Marple, Hemingway,
Grimm, Mark Twain, Alan Nelson. We like your chocolate, which we didn't have, and a great deal of
your music. And you'd like many of the things we have. Our thoughts, though, and the great aims and
directions of our history and development have beenтАФdrastically different from yours." He smiled and
blew out a puff of smoke. "Amusing fantasy, isn't it?"

"Yes." I knew I sounded abrupt, and I hadn't stopped to smile; the words were spilling out. "And
where is Verna?"

"Light years away, by your measurements."

I was suddenly irritated, I didn't know why. "A little hard to get to, then, wouldn't it be?"


For a moment he looked at me; then he turned to the window beside him. "Come here," he said, and I
walked around the counter to stand beside him. "There, off to the left"тАФhe put a hand on my shoulder
and pointed with his pipe stemтАФ"are two apartment buildings, built back to back. The entrance to one is
on Fifth Avenue, the entrance to the other on Sixth. See them? In the middle of the block; you can just
see their roofs."

I nodded, and he said, "A man and his wife live on the fourteenth floor of one of those buildings. A
wall of their living room is the back wall of the building. They have friends on the fourteenth floor of the
other building, and a wall of their living room is the back wall of their building. These two couples live, in
other words, within two feet of one another, since the back building walls actually touch."

The big man smiled. "But when the Robinsons want to visit the Bradens, they walk from their living
room to the front door. Then they walk down a long hall to the elevators. They ride fourteen floors down;
then, in the street, they must walk around to the next block. And the city blocks there are long; in bad
weather they have sometimes actually taken a cab. They walk into the other building, then go on through
the lobby, ride up fourteen floors, walk down a hall, ring a bell, and are finally admitted into their friends'
living roomтАФonly two feet from their own."

The big man turned back to the counter, and I walked around it to the other side again. "All I can tell
you," he said then, "is that the way the Robinsons travel is like space travel, the actual physical crossing of
those enormous distances." He shrugged. "But if they could only step through those two feet of wall
without harming themselves or the wallтАФwell, that is how we 'travel.' We don't cross space, we avoid it."