"Nancy Kress - The Mountain to Mohammed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

front. A few even had flowerboxes. But the windows were all barred, and over all
hung the grey fog, the dank cold, the pervasive smell of garbage.
The house they entered had no flowerbox. The steel front door, triple-locked,
opened directly into a living room furnished with a sagging sofa, a TV, and an
ancient daybed whose foamcast headboard flaked like dandruff. On the daybed lay
a child, her eyes bright with fever.
Sofa, TV, headboard vanished. Jesse felt his professional self take over, a
sensation as clean and fresh as plunging into cool water. He knelt by the bed and
smiled. The girl, who looked about nine or ten, didn't smile back. She had a long,
sallow, sullen face, but the long brown hair on the pillow was beautiful: clean,
lustrous, and well-tended.
"It's her belly," said one of the men who had met them at the subway. Jesse
glanced up at the note in his voice, and realized that he must be the child's father.
The man's hand trembled as he pulled the sheet from the girl's lower body. Her
abdomen was swollen and tender.
"How long has she been this way?"
 "Since yesterday," Kenny said, when the father didn't answer.
"Nausea? Vomiting?"
"Yeah. She can't keep nothing down."
Jesse's hands palpated gently. The girl screamed.
Appendicitis. He just hoped to hell peritonitis hadn't set in. He didn't want to
deal with peritonitis.
"Bring in all the lamps you have, with the brightestest watt bulbs. Boil waterтАФ"
He looked up. The room was very cold. "Does the stove work?"
The father nodded. He looked pale. Jesse smiled and said, "I don't think it's
anything we can't cure, with a little luck here." The man didn't answer.
Jesse opened his bag, his mind racing. Laser knife, sterile clamps, scaramineтАФ
he could do it even without nursing assistance provided there was no peritonitis. But
only if...The girl moaned and turned her face away. There were tears in her eyes.
Jesse looked at the man with the same long, sallow face and brown hair. "You her
father?"
The man nodded.
"I need to see her genescan."
The man clenched both fists at his side. Oh, God, if he didn't have the official
printout...Sometimes, Jesse had read, uninsurables burned them. One woman,
furious at the paper that would forever keep her out of the middle class, had mailed
hers, smeared with feces, and packaged with a plasticene explosive, to the President.
There had been headlines, columns, petitions...and nothing had changed. A country
fighting for its very economic survival didn't hesitate to expend front-line troops. If
there was no genescan for this child, Jesse couldn't use scaramine, that miracle
immune-system booster, to which about 15% of the population had a fatal reaction.
Without scaramine, under these operating conditions, the chances of post-operation
infection were considerably higher. If she couldn't take scaramine...
The father handed Jesse the laminated print-out, with the deeply-embossed seal
in the upper corner. Jesse scanned it quickly. The necessary RB antioncogene on
the eleventh chromosome was present. The girl was not potentially allergic to
scaramine. Her name was Rosamund.
"Okay, Rose," Jesse said gently. "I'm going to help you. In just a little while
you're going to feel so much better..." He slipped the needle with anesthetic into her
arm. She jumped and screamed, but within a minute she was out.