"Ron Goulart - The Robot In The Closet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

A frown was forming and deepening across his face. He scratched at his short-cropped black
hair. "Something is nagging at my brain, Sara," he said slowly. "Something I'm trying to recall
from some Nostalgia research I did. Didn't something truly awful happen in Frisco in April of
1906?"
 Sara smiled in a small way. "Well, there was a sort of earthquake and then some fires whichтАФ"
"The Great San Francisco Earthquake!" He stood up. "The earth shook, the sky burned. The
whole and entire city was destroyed, enormous chunks of choice real estate fell into yawning cracks
in the earth, peopleтАФ"
"Actually it was the subsequent fires that did most of the damage," Sara said. "If everything
goes well, though, we'll be out of there before the whole city goes up in flames."
CHAPTER 2
She looked so innocent asleep. Tucked in on herself like a child, pretty face serene, reddish hair
flared out on the aquamat. No hint in that calm lovely countenance that it fronted a brain capable of
fouling up a terrific vacation in a perfectly safe section of the WarmZone. Nothing in that evenly
rising and falling breast to indicate a heart beating behind it which was cold to his perfectly natural
dread of traveling around in time.
"It's dangerous. Much worse than going into an unfortified patch of the Florida Sector or trying
to travel across Bridgeport Limbo in a landcar."
Sara murmured and Tim realized he must have been talking to himself out loud.
He swung off the floating aquamat, made his way across the dimly lit sleeping pod. "I mean, I
don't even feel secure unless I have a night light," he said to himself. "Obviously I'm not the best
material for the rigors of time traveling."
The connecting-tube runners warmed automatically just before his bare feet trod on them.
Shoulders tucked in, Tim wandered through the predawn house, through the rec pod and the cook
pod and into the living pod.
The snow had ceased. Trickles of it were melting down across the plaz top of the dome.
Tim settled into a sewdocanvas chair, kicked out a bare foot at the large neowood trunk which
housed his collection of Nostalgia cassettes. Sometimes when he couldn't sleep he'd play a few
twentieth-century vidshows. His favorites were Dragnet and Leave It To Beaver, but this morning
the anticipation of viewing them didn't cheer him much.
"Guess I'll simply sit," he decided.
"Geeze, Louise, is there any place in this hogwallow where a bloke can procure a cup of Java?"
Tim sat up to the extent that he ended up crouched several feet to the right of his chair.
The closet door whirred open. There was a slight clinking and rattling before the robot-style
time machine came marching out into the room. He was wearing Tim's thermocoat. "Colder than a
witch's kiss in here," the mechanism complained, rubbing his metallic hands together and
producing a slippery grating sound. "Are you contemplating some sort of anchorite's existence orтАФ
"
"You're dormant. You can'tтАФ"
"Who put that bee in your chapeau?"
"You were standing in there earlier with your eyes looking glassy and not saying a damnтАФ"
"Why shouldn't my glims look glassy, schmucko? They're made out of glass, the real stuff."
The robot time machine strode to the center of the room. He was very light on his feet for a
machine. "I kept mum so you and the missus could argue in peace. Not my place to butt into
domestic squabbles. As I was telling Freud only last week, most family brawlsтАФ"
"Sigmund Freud? You know Sigmund Freud?"
 "Do I look like I'd waste time hobnobbing with Lou Freud or Elvira Freud? Of course, dimbulb,
I mean the one and only Sigmund. I was back in Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century,
on a job, and I thought I'd drop in on Sig to give him a tip on maternal fixations. He and I got toтАФ"
"Call him Sig, do you? The father of psychiatry. You go clunking in and yell, 'Hiya, Sig!'"