"Dead Center" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

"We're all lucky people." That was Allie, drifting into range, with Ruth behind
him. "We just happened to get born at the right time with the right dream. Any
one of us, fifty years ago, would have been called a wild-eyed visionaЧ"
"Any one of us," Kimberly said heavily, "fifty ago, would have had a different
dreamЧin time with the times."
Jock smiled, and let them talk, not joining in much. He listened to philosophy
and compliments and speculations and comments, and lay sprawled across the
comfortable couch in his own living room, with his wife's hand under his own,
consciously letting his mind play back and forth between the two lives he lived:
this, here . . . and the perfect mathematic bleakness of the metal beast that
would be his home in three days' time.
He squeezed his wife's hand, and she turned and looked at him, and there was no
doubt a man could have about what the world held in store.

When they had all gone, Jock walked down the hall and picked up the little boy
asleep on the floor, and put him back into his bed. Toby woke up long enough to
grab his father's hand and ask earnestly, out of the point in the conversation
where sleep had overcome him:
"Daddy, if the universe hasn't got any ends to it, how can you tell where you
are?"
"Me?" Jock asked. "I'm right next to the middle of it."
"How do you know?"
His father tapped him lightly on the chest.
"Because that's where the middle is." Jock smiled and stood up. "Go to sleep,
champ. Good night."
And Toby slept, while the universe revolved in all its mystery about the small
center Jock Kruger had assigned to it.

"Scared?" she asked, much later, in the spaceless silence of their bedroom.
He had to think about it before he could answer. "I guess not. I guess I think I
ought to be, but I'm not. I don't think I'd do it at all if I wasn't sure." He
was almost asleep, when the thought hit him, and he jerked awake and saw she was
sure enough lying wide-eyed and sleepless beside him. "Baby!" he said, and it
was almost an accusation. "Baby, you're not scared, are you?"
"Not if you're not," she said. But they never could lie to each other.

II

Toby sat on the platform, next to his grandmother. They were in the second row,
right in back of his mother and father, so it was all right for him to wriggle a
little bit, or whisper. They couldn't hear much of the speeches back there, and
what they did hear mostly didn't make sense to Toby. But every now and then
Grandma would grab his hand tight all of a sudden, and he understood what the
whole thing was about: it was because Daddy was going away again.
His Grandma's hand was very white, with little red and tan dots in it, and big
blue veins that stood out higher than the wrinkles in her skin, whenever she
grabbed at his hand. Later, walking over to the towering skyscraping rocket, he
held his mother's hand; it was smooth and cool and tan, all one color, and she
didn't grasp at him the way Grandma did. Later still, his father's two hands,
picking him up to kiss, were bigger and darker tan than his mother's, not so