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

Sebastian Long woke suddenly, with something on his mind. As night fog cleared away he remembered,
happily. Today he started the Demeter Bowl! At last there was time, at last there was moneyтАФsix
hundred and twenty-three dollars in the bank. He had packed and shipped the three dozen cocktail
glasses last night, engraved with Mrs.Klausman's initialsтАФhis last commercial order for as many months
as the Bowl would take.



He shifted from nightshirt to denims, gulped coffee, boiled an egg but was too excited to eat it. He went
to the front of his shop-workroom-apartment, checked the lock, waved at neighbors' children on their
way to school, and ceremoniously set a sign in the cluttered window.



It said: "NO COMMERCIAL ORDERS TAKEN UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE."
 From a closet he tenderly carried a shrouded object that made a double armful and laid it on his
workbench.Unshrouded , it was a glass bowlтАФwhat a glass bowl! The clearest Swedish lead glass, the
purest lines he had ever seen,his secret treasure since the crazy day he had bought it, long ago, for six
months' earnings. His wife had given him hell for that until the day she died. From the closet he brought a
portfolio filled with sketches and designs dating back to the day he had bought the bowl. He smiled over
the first, excitedly scrawledтАФa florid, rococo conception, unsuited to the classicism of the lines and the
serenity of the perfect glass.



Through many years and hundreds of sketches he had refined his conception to the point where it was,
he humbly felt, not unsuited to the medium. A strongly-molded Demeter was to dominate the piece, a
matron as serene as the glass, and all the fruits of the earth would flow from her gravely outstretched
arms. *



Suddenly and surely, he began to work. With a candle he thinly smoked an oval area on the outside of
the bowl. Two steady fingers clipped the Demeter drawing against the carbon black; a hair-fine needle in
his other hand traced her lines. When the transfer of the design was done, Sebastian Long readied his
lathe. He fitted a small



copperwheel, slightly worn as he liked them, into the chuck and with his fingers charged it with the finest
rouge fromRouen. He took an ashtray cracked in delivery and held it against the spinning disk. It bit in
smoothly, with the wiping feel to it that was exactly right.



Holding out his hands, seeing that the fingers did not tremble with excitement, he eased the great bowl to
the lathe and was about to make the first tiny cut of the millions that would go into the masterpiece.