"Jay Lake & Ruth Nestvold - The Canadian Who Came Almost All the Way Back from the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lake Jay)

She was silent for a long time. I knew she understood me тАФduring the time we had spent together over
the last winter, we had developed that odd pattern of shortcuts and silences that many married couples
use to communicate. I just barely remembered it from my own failed marriage.

She nodded out at the dimple. "You were born in the United States?"

Non sequitur. We had advanced to those as well. But I still didn't know where she was going with this.
"Yes."
"You've been on the winning team all your life. You don't have a clue what it's like to be Canadian,
having the world's biggest brother next door." A hare hopped into our line of vision. I watched it make
tracks in the snow left in the sun's shadow.

"The United States," Kelly continued, not looking at me. "The 'we did it first' country. You build the
space shuttle, we build a robot arm. Canada makes another contribution to progress."

She seemed to expect a serious answer. I didn't give it to her.

"And now your government keeps sending you here to babysit me. Because the hard men with the bright
lights didn't learn anything."

"No one is forcing me."

She gave me a look that asked me whom I thought I was kidding, one eyebrow raised and her wide lips
somewhere close to a smile. "No, but I know why you're here. You hate it, the whole world hates it, but
especially you Yanks. You hate that a Canadian went to the stars first, without you."

She was partly right.

But only partly.

Kelly was a hard nut to crack, laughter or no laughter. It wasn't until we'd been alone together regularly
for almost a year before she started calling me by my first name.

Even though I had been waiting for it for what seemed forever, I almost didn't notice. We were out on
the lake in the park's Ranger Cherokee to take some measurements of our own of the surface
temperature near the dimple, cross-checking the instruments. My Geiger counter kept acting up тАФthe
third one the agency had sent me тАФbut there was nothing wrong with our old-fashioned thermometers.

I had no interest in taking the boat into the middle. The drop to the flat surface of the dimple was about
ten feet and looked vaguely like a ring of waterfalls.

"I'm keeping at least five boat lengths away," I said. "We'll circle."

Kelly trailed the thermometer on a length of fishing line. "Fine with me, Bruce."

I was so busy navigating the rim of the dimple, the fact that she had called me "Bruce" didn't immediately
register. When it did, it was like a kick to the gut, and I jerked the tiller toward the edge.

I corrected immediately, and Kelly looked up. "Temperature holding steady here. What about you?"