"Fritz Leiber - The Hound" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

"My dog?"
"Well, it was there just a second ago. Came in right behind you,
looking as if it owned youтАФI mean you owned it." She giggled
briefly through her nose. "One of Mrs. Montmorency's mastiffs
escaped from the chauffeur and wandering around the store, I
presume."
He continued to stare at her blankly. "A joke," she explained
patiently, and returned to her work.
"I've got to get a grip on myself," he found himself muttering tritely


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as the elevator lowered him noiselessly to the basement.
"I've got to get a grip on myself," he kept repeating as he hurried to
the locker room, left his coat and lunch, gave his hair a quick
careful brushing, hurried again through the still-empty aisles, and
slipped in behind the socks-and-handkerchiefs counter. "It's just
nerves. I'm not crazy. But I got to get a grip on myself."
"What do you mean, talking to yourself and not noticing anybody?
Don't you know that's the first symptom of insanity?"
Gertrude Rees had stopped on her way over to neckties. Light
brown hair, faultlessly waved after the fashion of department-store
salesgirls, framed a serious, not-too-pretty face.
"Just jittery, I guess," he murmured. "Sorry." What else could you
say? Even to Gertrude?
"I guess all of us get that way sometimes these days, pal," she
answered. Her hand slipped across the counter to squeeze his for a
moment. "Buck up."
But even as he watched her walk away, his hands automatically
arranging display boxes, the new question was furiously hammering
in his brain. What else could you say? What words could you use to
explain it? Above all, to whom could you tell it? A dozen names
printed themselves in his mind and were as quickly discarded.
One remained. Tom Goodsell. Tom was a screwball with a lot of
common sense. Liked to talk about queer things. He would tell
Tom. Tonight, after the fire warden's class.
Shoppers were already filtering down into the basement. "He wears
size eleven, madam? Yes, we have some new patterns in. These are

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silk and lisle." But their ever-increasing numbers gave him no sense
of security. Crowding the aisles, they became shapes behind which
something might hide. He was continually peering past them. A
little child who wandered behind the counter and pushed at his knee