"R. A. Lafferty - Stories 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lafferty R A)

 "It must be half done. However it has happened, I have caught up at
least a day's work; I will keep on."
He must have worked silently for another eight or ten hours.
He was caught up completely on his back work.
"Well, to some extent I can work into the future. I can head-up and
carry over. I can put in everything but the figures of the field reports."
And he did so.
"It will he hard to bury me in work again. I could almost coast
for a day. I don't even know what day it is, but I must have worked twenty
hours straight through and nobody has arrived. Perhaps nobody ever will
arrive. If they are moving with the speed of the people in the nightmare
outside, it is no wonder they have not arrived."
He put his head down in his arms on the desk. The last thing he saw
before he closed his eyes was the misshapen left thumb that had always been
his and which he had always tried to conceal a little by the way handled he
his hands.
"At least I know that I am still myself. I'd know myself anywhere by
that."
Then he went to sleep at his desk.

Jenny came in with a quick click-click-click of high heels, and he
wakened to the noise.
"What are you doing dozing at your desk, Mr. Vincent? Have you been
here all night?"
"I don't know, Jenny. Honestly I don't."
"I was only teasing. Sometimes when I get here a little early I take
a catnap myself."
The clock said six minutes till eight, and the second hand was
sweeping normally. Time had returned to the world. Or to him. But had all
that early morning of his been a dream? Then it had been a very efficient
dream. He had accomplished work he could hardly have done in two days. And
it was the same day that it was supposed to be.
He went to the water fountain. The water now behaved normally. He
went to the window. The traffic was behaving as it should. Though sometimes
slow and sometimes snarled, yet it was in the pace of the regular world.
The other workers arrived. They were not balls of fire, but neither
was it necessary to observe them for several minutes to he sure that they
weren't dead.
"It did have its advantages," Charles Vincent said. "I would be
afraid to have it permanently, but it would be handy to go into the state
for a few minutes a day and accomplish the business of hours. I may be a
case for the doctor. But just how would I go about telling a doctor what was
bothering me?"
Now it had surely been less than too hours from his first rising
till the time that he wakened from his second sleep to the noise of Jenny.
And how long that second sleep had been, or in which time enclave, he had no
idea. But how account for it all? He had spent a long time in his own rooms,
much longer than ordinary in his confusion. He had walked the city mile
after mile in his puzzlement. And he had sat in the little park for hours
and studied the situation. And he had sat and worked at his own desk for an