"C M Kornbluth - The Little Black Bag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

The Little Black Bag



C. M. Kornbluth




The Little Black Bag



Old Dr. Full felt the winter in his bones as he limped down the alley. It was the alley and the back door
he had chosen rather than the sidewalk and the front door because of the brown paper bag under his
arm. He knew perfectly well that the flat-faced, stringy-haired women of his street and their gap-toothed,
sour-smelling husbands did not notice if he brought a bottle of cheap wine to his room. They all but lived
on the stuff themselves, varied with whiskey when pay checks were boosted by overtime. But Dr. Full,
unlike them, was ashamed. A complicated disaster occurred as he limped down the littered alley. One of
the neighborhood dogs-a mean little black one he knew and hated, with its teeth always bared and
always snarling with menace-hurled at his legs through a hole in the board fence that lined his path. Dr.
Full flinched, then swung his leg in what was to have been a satisfying kick to the animal's gaunt ribs. But
the winter in his bones weighed down the leg. His foot failed to clear a half-buried brick, and he sat down
abruptly, cursing. When he smelled unbottled wine and realized his brown paper package had slipped
from under his arm and smashed, his curses died on his lips. The snarling black dog was circling him at a
yard's distance, tensely stalking, but he ignored it in the greater disaster.

With stiff fingers as he sat on the filth of the alley, Dr. Full unfolded the brown paper bag's top, which
had been crimped over, grocer-wise. The early autumnal dusk had come; he could not see plainly what
was left. He lifted out the jug-handled top of his half gallon, and some fragments, and then the bottom of
the bottle. Dr. Full was far too occupied to exult as he noted that there was a good pint left. He had a
problem, and emotions could be deferred until the fitting time.

The dog closed in, its snarl rising in pitch. He set down the bottom of the bottle and pelted the dog with
the curved triangular glass fragments of its top. One of them connected, and the dog ducked back
through the fence, howling. Dr. Full then placed a razor-like edge of the half-gallon bottle's foundation to
his lips and drank from it as though it were a giant's cup. Twice he had to put it down to rest his arms, but
in one minute he had swallowed the pint of wine.

He thought of rising to his feet and walking through the alley to his room, but a flood of well-being
drowned the notion. It was, after all, inexpressibly pleasant to sit there and feel the frost-hardened mud of
the alley turn soft, or seem to, and




to feel the winter evaporating from his bones under a warmth which spread from his stomach through his
limbs.

A three-year-old girl in a cut-down winter coat squeezed through the same hole in the board fence from