"James E. Gunn - The Witching Hour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gunn James E)

glared at it suspiciously. Sweat trickled down his neck.

A tinkling of little silver bells. Laughter? Matt looked up quickly, angrily. The woods were thin along the
top of this Ozark ridge. Descending to the lake, sparkling blue, tantalizingly cool far below, they grew
thicker, but here the only person near was the young girl shuffling through the dust several hundred yards
beyond the crippled car. And her head was bent down to study her feet.

Matt shrugged and wiped the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. A late June afternoon in
southern Missouri was too hot for this kind of work, for any kind of work. Matt wondered if it had been
a mistake.

Heat waves shimmered and a haze of red dust settled slowly as he righted the tire and began to roll it
back toward the old green Ford with one bare wheel drum pointing upward at a slight angle. The tire
rolled easily, as if it repented its brief dash for freedom, but it was a dirty job and MattтАЩs hands and
clothes were soiled red when he reached the car. With one hand clutching the tire, Matt studied the road.
Surely he had stopped on one of the few level stretches in these hills, but the tire had straightened up
from the side of the car anyway and had started rolling as if the car were parked on a steep incline.

Matt reflected bitterly on the luck that had turned a slow leak into a flat only twenty-five miles from the
cabin. It couldnтАЩt have happened on the highway, ten miles back, where he could have pulled into a
service station. It had to wait until he was committed to this rutted cow track. The tireтАЩs escapade had
been only the most recent of a series of annoyances and irritations to which bruised shins and scraped
knuckles bore mute, painful witness.

He sighed. After all, he had wanted isolation. GuyтАЩs offer of a hunting cabin in which to write his book
had seemed ideal at the time; now Matt wasnтАЩt so certain. If this was a fair sample, Matt was beginning
to realize that much of his time might be wasted on the elementary problems of existence.

Cautiously Matt rolled the tire to the rear of the car, laid it carefully on its side, and completed pulling the
spare from the trunk. Warily he maneuvered the spare to the left rear wheel, knelt, lifted it, fitted it over
the bolts and stepped back. He sighed again, but this time it was with relief.

Kling-ng! Klang! Rattle!

Matt looked down. His foot was at least two inches from the hubcap, but it was rocking now, empty.
Matt saw the last nut roll under the car.

MattтАЩs swearing was vigorous, systematic, and exhaustive. It concerned itself chiefly with the latent
perversity of inanimate objects.

There was something about machines and the things they made that was basically alien to the human
spirit. For a time they might disguise themselves as willing slaves, but eventually, inevitably, they turned
against their masters. At the psychological moment, they rebelled.

Or perhaps it was the difference in people. For some people things always went wrong: their cakes fell,
their boards split, their golf balls sliced into the woods. Others established a mysterious sympathy with
their tools. Luck? Skill? Coordination? Experience? It was, he felt, something more conscious and more
malign.

Matt remembered a near-disastrous brush with chemistry; he had barely passed qualitative analysis. For