"Pat Frank - Alas, Babylon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frank Pat)

fiction/science-fiction/post-apocalyptic/Frank,Pat-Alas_Babylon-v2.0

In Fort Repose, a river town in Central Florida, it was said that sending
a message by Western Union was the same as broadcasting it over the combined
networks. This was not entirely true. It was true that Florence Wechek, the
manager, gossiped. Yet she judiciously classified the personal intelligence
that flowed under her plump fingers, and maintained a prudent censorship over
her tongue. The scandalous and the embarrassing she excised from her
conversation. Sprightly, trivial, and harmless items she passed on to friends,
thus enhancing her status and relieving the tedium of spinsterhood. If your
sister was in trouble, and wired for money, the secret was safe with Florence
Wechek. But if your sister bore a legitimate baby, its sex and weight would
soon be known all over town.

Florence awoke at six-thirty, as always, on a Friday in early December.
Heavy, stiff and graceless, she pushed herself out of bed and padded through
the living room into the kitchen. She stumbled onto the back porch, opened the
screen door a crack, and fumbled for the milk carton on the stoop. Not until
she straightened did her china-blue eyes begin to discern movement in the
hushed gray world around her. A jerky-tailed squirrel darted out on the
longest limb of her grapefruit tree. Sir Percy, her enormous yellow cat, rose
from his burlap couch behind the hot water heater, arched his back, stretched,
and rubbed his shoulders on her flannel robe. The African lovebirds
rhythmically swayed, heads pressed together, on the swing in their cage. She
addressed the lovebirds: "Good morning, Anthony. Good morning, Cleo."

Their eyes, spectacularly ringed in white, as if embedded in mint Life
Savers, blinked at her. Anthony shook his green and yellow plumage and rasped
a greeting. Cleo said nothing. Anthony was adventurous, Cleo timid. On
occasion Anthony grew raucous and irascible and Florence released him into
limitless freedom outside. But always, at dusk, Anthony waited in the
Turk's-cap, or atop the frangipani, eager to fly home. So long as Cleo
preferred comfortable and sheltered imprisonment, Anthony would remain a
domesticated parrot. That's what they'd told her when she bought the birds in
Miami a month before, and apparently it was true.

Florence carried their cage into the kitchen and shook fresh sunflower
seed into their feeder. She filled Sir Percy's bowl with milk, and crumpled a
bit of wafer for the goldfish in the bowl on the counter. She returned to the
living room and fed the angelfish, mollies, guppies, and vivid peons in the
aquarium. She noted that the two miniature catfish, useful scavengers, were
active. She was checking the tank's temperature, and its electric filter and
heater, when the percolator chuckled its call to breakfast. At seven, exactly,
Florence switched on the television, turned the knob to Channel 8, Tampa, and
sat down to her orange juice and eggs. Her morning routine was unvaried and
efficient. The only bad parts of it were cooking for one and eating alone. Yet
breakfast was not her loneliest meal, not with Anthony ogling and gabbling,
the six fat goldfish dancing a dreamy oriental ballet on diaphanous fins, Sir
Percy rubbing against her legs under the table, and her cheery friends on the
morning show, hired, at great expense, to inform and entertain her.