"C M Kornbluth - The Goodly Creatures" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

Farwell glanced at the clock on his desk, poured one from his private bottle; Brady receded a little into
the background of his mind.



"Mr. Angelo Libonari to see you," said the intercom. "About employment." "Send him in." Libonari
stumbled on the carpeting that began at the thres-



hold of Harwell's office.,.- "I saw your ad," he began shrilly, "your ad for a junior copywriter."
"Have a seat." The boy was shabby and jittery. "Didn't you bring a presentation?"



He didn't understand. "No, I just saw your ad. I didn't know I had to be introduced. I'm sorry I took up
your timeтАФ" He was on his way out already.



"Wait a minute, Angelo! I meant, have you got any copies of what you've done, where you've been to
school, things like that."



"Oh." The boy pulled out a sheaf of paper from his jacket pocket. "This stuff isn't very good," 'he said.
"As a matter of fact, it isn't really finished. I wrote it for a magazine, Integration, I don't suppose you ever
heard of it; they were going to print it but they folded up, it's a kind of prose poem." Abruptly he ran dry
and handed over the wad of dog-eared, interlined copy. His eyes said to Farwell: please don't laugh at
me.



Farwell read at random: "тАФand then the Moon will drift astern and out of sight, the broken boundary
that used to stand between the eye and the mind." He read it aloud and asked: "Now, what does that
mean?"



The boy shyly and proudly explained: "Well, what I was trying to bring out there was that the Moon
used to be as far as anybody could go with his eyes. If you wanted to find out anything about the other
celestial bodies you had to guess and make inductionsтАФthat's sort of the whole theme of the
pieceтАФliberation, broken boundaries."



"Uh-huh," said Farwell, and went on reading. It was a rambling account of an Earth-Ganymede flight.
There was a lot of stuff as fuzzy as the first bit, there-were other bits that were hard, clean writing. The
kid might be worth developing if only he didn't look and act so peculiar. Maybe it was just nervousness.