"Nancy Kress - In a World Like This" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

The carpet in the corridor outside my office is sopping. Inside the office, water meanders down the
walls, drips from the ceiling onto my desk, pools on chairs and file cabinets. As I stand in the doorway
staring at this, Helen hurries around the corner, looking harried.
"Oh, Mr. Catton - it's the sprinkler system, they think. That's what was wrong in the lobby yesterday,
too. They think that while they were jackhammering the floor someone hit something vital and jammed
the whole thing."
"How long-?"
"They won't say!" Helen cries. I have never seen her so overwrought; she is usually the calmest and
most efficient secretary on the floor, making consistent sense out of my chaotic meeting and memo flow.
"They think it happened because of a workman who is very inexperienced; he had only been on the job
two weeks and three days. His supervisor was out sick because he caught the flu from his little boy, who
got it at day-care because the supervisor's wife died in a car crash two years ago and he's raising the little
boy alone."
I stare at her, "Helen - how do you know all that?"
She makes a vague gesture, flinging her palms upward as if begging for mercy. "The control thing for
the sprinkler system was manufactured in Japan, because it cost sixteen dollars and forty-two cents less
per unit to do it there. The engineer said it appeared to be functioning perfectly, because he took it out
and tested it, but he won't say how long it will be before you can use your office!"
"Well," I say helplessly - could Helen be having some sort of secretarial burn-out? - "we can work
around the mess, I suppose. Where did you put my phone and the Hentschel files?"
"In George Schwartz's office. The water isn't too bad in there, and George is out because he took a
vacation day to go up to his daughter's college, because she's failing two subjects, due to excessive
partying with Kappa Delta Omicron. But I don't know why there's less water in his office than in yours!"
"Well," I say, more helplessly than before, "I don't suppose it matters. So long as we can get on with
the day. So it goes."
And at my last words Helen calms down instantly, moving rapidly past calm to a set and rigid face,
from which she stares at me in silence like stone.

"Look at that!" Kip says, his face pressed to the train window. I obediently look; Kip has had a
hysterical edge to him for a week, ever since Sandra moved out with their girls.
"John - did you see it?"
"Did I see what?"
"On that other track. A train went by and it...shimmered. Like a ghost image on TV."
"There are three sets of track there."
"No - it wasn't on the third set! You didn't see it?"
"I wasn't looking."
Kip grimaces abstractedly beneath his hat brim. When the brim dips forward, I brace myself. Kip has
been twirling his self-aggrandizing veils of information theory all week: message channels. Noise level.
Algorithms. Context-sensitive redundancy. If he does it yet again, I will change my seat. This time, I will.
But he says something else.
"Lara called Sandy and told her that I said I wanted to marry her. Marry Lara."
I am somehow not surprised by this. "Do you want to marry her?"
"Of course not. I still care everything for Sandy."
"Did you say anything to Lara that might lead her to think-?"
"Oh, hell, how should I know? You know how it is. You're in bed, you say things - and then women
try to hold you to them in a goddamned court of law. Sandy had a fit. She called me after Lara called her
, and then Lara called on the line in the den, and it seemed I was on the phone with one or the other of
them all night. Christ, the hysteria all around."
I can picture it and am meanly glad that Kip lives at the other, richer end of Hickory Village.
At the station, he trudges toward the Depot, a bar-cum-restaurant built in an antiquated baggage