"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Lathe of Heaven" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

will the mind do, each morning, waking?


His eyelids had been burned away, so that he could not close his eyes, and the
light entered into his brain, searing.
He could not turn his head, for blocks of fallen concrete pinned him down and the
steel rods projecting from their cores held his head in a vise. When these were
gone he could move again; he sat up. He was on the cement steps; a dandelion
flowered by his hand, growing from a little cracked place in the steps. After a
while he stood up, but as soon as he was on his feet he felt deathly sick, and knew
it was the radiation sickness. The door was only two feet from him, for the
balloonbed when inflated half filled his room. He got to the door and opened it
and went through it. There stretched the endless linoleum corridor, heaving
slightly up and down for miles, and far down it, very far, the men's room. He
started out toward it, trying to hold on to the wall, but there was nothing to hold on

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to, and the wall turned into the floor.
"Easy now. Easy there."
The elevator guard's face was hanging above him like a paper lantern, pallid,
fringed with graying hair.
"It's the radiation," he said, but Mannie didn't seem to understand, saying only,
"Take it easy."
He was back on his bed in his room.
"You drunk?"
"No."
"High on something?"
"Sick."
"What you been taking?"
"Couldn't find the fit," he said, meaning that he had been trying to lock the door
through which the dreams came, but none of the keys had fit the lock.
"Medic's coming up from the fifteenth floor," Mannie said faintly through the roar
of breaking seas.
He was floundering and trying to breathe. A stranger was sitting on his bed
holding a hypodermic and looking at him.
"That did it," the stranger said. "He's coming round. Feel like hell? Take it easy.
You ought to feel like hell. Take all this at once?" He displayed seven of the little
plastifoil envelopes from the autodrug dispensary. "Lousy mixture, barbiturates
and Dexedrine. What were you trying to do to yourself?"
It was hard to breathe, but the sickness was gone, leaving only an awful weakness.
"They're all dated this week," the medic went on, a young man with a brown
ponytail and bad teeth. "Which means they're not all off your own Pharmacy Card,
so I've got to report you for borrowing. I don't like to, but I got called in and I
haven't any choice, see. But don't worry, with these drugs it's not a felony, you'll
just get a notice to report to the police station and they'll send you up to the Med
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 THE LATHE OF HEAVEN