"Ursula K. LeGuin - The New Atlantis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

The thread is tough; you cannot cut it with one stroke.

"What have you been playing?" he asked.

"Forrest, Schubert."

"With the quartet?"

"Trio, now. Janet went to Oakland with a new lover."

"Ah, poor Max."

"It's just as well, really. She isn't a good pianist."
I make Simon laugh too, though I don't intend to. We talked until it was past time for me to go to work.
My shift since the Full Employment Act last year is ten to two. I am an inspector in a recycled paper bag
factory. I have never rejected a bag yet; the electronic inspector catches all the defective ones first. It is a
rather depressing job. But it's only four hours a day, and it takes more time than that to go through all the
lines and physical and mental examinations, and fill out all the forms, and talk to all the welfare counselors
and inspectors every week in order to qualify as Unemployed, and then line up every day for the ration
stamps and the dole. Simon thought I ought to go to work as usual. I tried to, but I couldn't. He had felt
very hot to the touch when I

kissed him good-bye. I went instead and got a black-market doctor. A girl at the factory had
recommended her, for an abortion, if I ever wanted one without going through the regulation two years of
sex-depressant drugs the fed-meds make you take when they give you an abortion. She was a jeweler's
assistant in a shop on Alder Street, and the girl said she was convenient because if you didn't have
enough cash, you could leave something in pawn at the jeweler's as payment. Nobody ever does have
enough cash, and of course credit cards aren't worth much on the black market.

The doctor was willing to come at once, so we rode home on the bus together. She gathered very soon
that Simon and I were married, and it was funny to see her look at us and smile like a cat. Some people
love illegality for its own sake. Men, more often than women. It's men who make laws, and enforce them,
and break them, and think the whole performance is wonderful. Most women would rather just ignore
them. You could see that this woman, like a man, actually enjoyed breaking them. That may have been
what put her into an illegal business in the first place, a preference for the shady side. But there was more
to it than that. No doubt she'd wanted to be a doctor too; and the Federal Medical Association doesn't
admit women into the medical schools. She probably got her training as some other doctor's private
pupil, under the counter. Very much as Simon learned mathematics, since the universities don't teach
much but Business Administration and Advertising and Media Skills anymore. However she learned it,
she seemed to know her stuff. She fixed up a kind of homemade traction device for Simon very handily
and informed him that if he did much more walking for two months he'd be crippled the rest of his life, but
if he behaved himself he'd just be more or less lame. It isn't the kind of thing you'd expect to be grateful
for being told, but we both were. Leaving, she gave me a bottle of about two hundred plain white pills,
unlabeled. "Aspirin," she said. "He'll be in a good deal of pain off and on for weeks."

I looked at the bottle. I had never seen aspirin before, only the Super-Buffered Pane-Gon and the
Triple-Power N-L-G-Zic and the Extra-Strength Apansprin with the miracle ingredient more doctors
recommend, which the fed-meds always give you prescriptions for, to be filled at your FMA-approved
private enterprise friendly drugstore at the low, low prices established by the Pure Food and Drug