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

You've got to decide on the spot, the middle-aged man at the Lexington Avenue bar had told me,
because you'll never get another chance. I know; I've tried. Now I stood there thinking; there were
people I'd hate never to see again, and a girl I was just getting to know, and this was the world I'd been
born in. Then I thought about leaving that room, going back to my job, then back to my room at night.
And finally I thought of the deep-green valley in the picture and the little yellow beach in the morning sun.
"I'll go," I whispered. "If you'll have me."

He studied my face. "Be sure," he said sharply. "Be certain. We want no one there who won't be
happy, and if you have any least doubt, we'd prefer thatтАФ"

"I'm sure," I said.

After a moment the gray-haired man slid open a drawer under the counter and brought out a little
rectangle of yellow cardboard. One side was printed, and through the printing ran a band of light green; it
looked like a railroad ticket to White Plains or somewhere. The printing said, "Good, when validated, for
one trip to verna. Non-transferable. One-way only."

"AhтАФhow much?" I said, reaching for my wallet, wondering if he wanted me to pay.

He glanced at my hand on my hip pocket. "All you've got. Including your small change." He smiled.
"You won't need it any more, and we can use your currency for operating expense. Light bills, rent, and
so on."

"I don't have much."

"That doesn't matter." From under the counter he brought out a heavy stamping machine, the kind you
see in railroad ticket offices. "We once sold a ticket for thirty-seven hundred dollars. And we sold
another just like it for six cents." He slid the ticket into the machine, struck the lever with his fist, then
handed the ticket to me. On the back, now was a freshly printed rectangle of purple ink, and within it the
words, "Good this day only," followed by the date. I put two five-dollar bills, a one, and seven-teen cents
in change on the counter. "Take the ticket to the Acme Depot," the gray-haired man said, and, leaning
across the counter, began giving me directions for getting there.


It's a tiny hole-in-the-wall, the Acme Depot; you may have seen itтАФjust a little store front on one of
the narrow streets west of Broadway. On the window is painted, not very well, "Acme." Inside, the walls
and ceiling, under layers of old paint, are covered with the kind of stamped tin you see in old buildings.
There's a worn wooden counter and a few battered chrome-and-imitation-red-leather chairs. There are
scores of places like the Acme Depot in that areaтАФlittle theatre-ticket agencies, obscure bus-line offices,
employment agencies. You could pass this one a thousand times and never really see it; and if you live in
New York, you probably have.

Behind the counter, when I arrived, a shirt-sleeved man smoking a cigar stump stood working on
some papers; four or five people silently waited in the chairs. The man at the counter glanced up as I
stepped in, looked down at my hand for my ticket, and when I showed it, nodded at the last vacant
chair, and I sat down.

There was a girl beside me, hands folded on her purse. She was pleasant-looking, rather pretty; I
thought she might have been a stenographer. Across the narrow little office sat a young Negro in work
clothes, his wife beside him holding their little girl in her lap. And there was a man of around fifty, his face