"H.H. Hollis - Sword Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hollis H. H)

SWORD GAME

H. H. Hollis
Late in the afternoon of an ugly fall day, a forty-year-old
topologist, employed to teach mathematics at a university he
despised, bored by his students and frightened that he had
done everything of significance in his life that he would ever
do, blundered head-down into a group of students handing
out flowers and handbills. Before he could retrieve his
dropped book bag and move on to continue composing in his
head a memorable letter of resignation, his eye had fallen on
a grubby teen-age girl and he was hopelessly entrapped.
Thinking to break the spell, he boldly said to her, "Aren't
you in my class in elementary topology?"
She licked the raspberry snow cone she was holding and
said, without a trace of a smile, "You must be mad. I'm not
a student, just a wandering Gypsy fortune teller." She held
out the snow cone for him to take a lick. "Do you have a
place where we could go, and I would tell your fortune?"
The mathematician knew she was no Gypsy, for your
modern, urban Romany never allows himself to be as dirty
as she was. He was certain she was putting him on, but
his mood of desperate boredom was such that he said,
"Cra-a-a-zy, Gypsy! Fall up to my pad, and we'll tell fortunes
and other lies till the world melts."
They left hand in hand under the eyes of forty witnesses.
Within their own subculture, however, the rebel students
conformed to a rigid code; and they would have died rather
than give information to the fuzz or even to the Dean of the
Faculty; so the professor's absolute breach of propriety in
picking up a student went unremarked and unreported.
When he had taken off her clothes, the girl was every bit
as dirty as she appeared to be, but this only made him more
determined to take advantage of her. Later, he persuaded her
to shower by promising to bathe with her; and she looked,
when she left, with her rum-colored hair in two long plaits,
like a fresh-scrubbed Girl Scout.
The crust turned out to be her equivalent of the makeup
squares use; when he came past the common the next day,
she was as delectably grimy as ever, and she held a fresh
snow cone purple with grape syrup.
The two joined hands and went directly to his apartment.
The young woman hardly spoke until late in the evening, after
they had showered together. She was toweling her hair and
the information came indistinctly. "I went to the Provost's
office today," she said, "and told him about us."
The professor was so uncharacteristically content he con-
templated the ruin of his academic career with pleasure. "All
right, big mouth, how are we going to live?"
"I'm not really a Gypsy," she said, "but I really was in a