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

I wandered around the neighborhood for a while and had a couple of beers in one of the ultra-Irish bars
on Third Avenue. After a pleasant argument with a gent who thought the Russians didn't have any atomic
bombs and faked their demonstrations and that we ought to blow up their industrial cities tomorrow at
dawn, I went back to the hotel.

I didn't get to sleep easily. The citizen who didn't believe Russia could maul the United States pretty
badly or at all had started me thinking again-all kinds of ugly thoughts. Dr. Mines, who had turned into a
shrunken old man at the mention of applying Gomez's work. The look on the boy's face. My layman's
knowledge that present-day "atomic energy" taps only the smallest fragment of the energy locked up in
the atom. My layman's knowledge that once genius has broken a trail in science, mediocrity can follow
the trail.

But I slept at last, for three hours.

At four-fifteen A.M. according to my watch the telephone rang long and hard. There was some
switchboard and long-distance-operator mumbo-jumbo and then Julio's gleeful voice: "Beel!
Congratulate us. We got marriage!"

"Married," I said fuzzily. "You got married, not marriage. How's that again?"

"We got married. Me and Rosa. We get on the train, the taxi



driver takes us to justice of peace, we got married, we go to hotel here."

"Congratulations," I said, waking up. "Lots of congratulations. But you're under age, there's a waiting
period-"

"Not in this state," he chuckled. "Here is no waiting periods and here I have twenty-one years if I say
so."

"Well," I said. "Lots of congratulations, Julio. And tell Rosa she's got herself a good boy."
 "Thanks, Beel," he said shyly. "I call you so you don't worry when I don't come in tonight. I think I come
in with Rosa tomorrow so we tell her mama and my mama and papa. I call you at the hotel, I still have
the piece of paper."

"Okay, Julio. All the best. Don't worry about a thing." I hung up, chuckling, and went right back to sleep.

Well, sir, it happened again.

I was shaken out of my sleep by the strong, skinny hand of Admiral MacDonald. It was seven-thirty and
a bright New York morning. Dalhousie had pulled a blank canvassing the neighborhood for Gomez, got
panicky, and bucked it up to higher headquarters.

"Where is he?" the admiral rasped.

"On his way here with his bride of one night," I said. "He slipped over a couple of state lines and got
married."