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

He smiled. "Draw a breath hereтАФand exhale it on Verna."

I said softly, "And that's how they arrived, isn't it? The people in the picture. You took them there."
He nodded, and I said, "Why?"

He shrugged. "If you saw a neighbor's house on fire, would you rescue his family if you could? As
many as you could, at least?"

"Yes."
 "WellтАФso would we."

"You think it's that bad, then? With us?"

"How does it look to you?"

I thought about the headlines in my morning paper, that morning and every morning. "Not so good."

He just nodded and said, "We can't take you all, can't even take very many. So we've been selecting
a few."

"For how long?"

"A long time." He smiled. "One of us was a member of Lincoln's cabinet. But it was not until just
before your First World War that we felt we could see what was coming; until then we'd been merely
observers. We opened our first agency in Mexico City in nineteen thirteen. Now we have branches in
every major city."

"Nineteen thirteen," I murmured, as something caught at my memory. "Mexico. Listen! DidтАФ"

"Yes." He smiled, anticipating my question. "Ambrose Bierce joined us that year, or the next. He lived
until nineteen thirty-one, a very old man, and wrote four more books, which we have." He turned back a
page in the folder and pointed to a cabin in the first large photograph. "That was his home."

"And what about Judge Crater?"

"Crater?"

"Another famous disappearance; he was a new York judge who simply disappeared some years
ago."

"I don't know. We had a judge, I remember, from New York City, some twenty-odd years ago, but I
can't recall his name."

I leaned across the counter toward him, my face very close to his, and I nodded. "I like your little
joke," I said. "I like it very much, more than I can possibly tell you." Very softly I added, "When does it
stop being a joke?"

For a moment he studied me; then he spoke. "Now. If you want it to."