"C M Kornbluth - Gomez" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

So I recorded Gomez's progress with English, his taste for chicken pot pie and rice pudding, his habit of
doing his own housework on the top floor and his old-maidish neatness. "You live your first fifteen years
in a tin shack, Beel," he told me once, "and you find out you like things nice and clean." I've seen Dr.
Mines follow Gomez through the top floor as the boy swept and dusted, talking at him hi their
mathematical jargon.

Gomez worked in forty-eight-hour spells usually, and not eating much. Then for a couple of days he'd
live like a human being, grabbing naps, playing catch on the lawn with one or another of the Security
people, talking with me about his childhood in Puerto Rico and his youth in New York. He taught me a
little Spanish and asked me to catch him up on bad mistakes in English.

"But don't you ever want to get out of here?" I demanded one day.

He grinned: "Why should I, Beel? Here I eat good, I can send money to the parents. Best, I find out
what the big professors are up to without I have to wait five-ten years for damn declassifying."

"Don't you have a girl?"

He was embarrassed and changed the subject back to the big professors.

Dr. Mines drove up then with his chauffeur, who looked like a G-man and almost certainly was. As
usual, the physicist was toting a bulging briefcase. After a few polite words with me, he and Julio went
indoors and upstairs.

They were closeted for five hours-a record. When Dr. Mines came down I expected the usual briefing
session. But he begged off. "Noth-



ing serious," he said. "We just sat down and kicked some ideas of his around. I told him to go ahead.
We've been-ah-using him very much like a sort of computer, you know. Turning him loose on the
problems that were too tough for me and some of the other men. He's got the itch for research now. It
would be very interesting if his forte turned out to be creative."

I agreed.

Julio didn't come down for dinner. I woke up in darkness that night when there was a loud bump
overhead, and went upstairs in my pyjamas.

Gomez was sprawled, fully dressed, on the floor. He'd tripped over a footstool. And he didn't seem to
have noticed. His lips were moving and he stared straight at me without knowing I was there.

"You "all right, Julio?" I asked, and started to help him to his feet.

He got up mechanically and said: "-real values of the zeta function vanish."

"How's that?"

He saw me then and asked, puzzled: "How you got in here, Beel? Is dinnertime?"