"Judith Merril - Beyond Human Ken" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

possible road from possible marsh.
"I had to come up to the Great Bear Lake where every pros-pector sneezes and all the men are vile.
Adventure I wantedтАФ-hah ! Well, here I am, using up the last of my girlhood as a water-purification
expert for a bunch of near-sighted nuclear physicists desperately hopeful that they look like characters in
a Northwest romance!"
Marquis sloughed the runabout around a dwarfed red spruce that grew belligerently in the middle of
the damp highway. "Should be there in a minute or two, Es. Forty of the sweetest acres that anybody
ever talked the Canadian government into selling. And a little bumpy hill just off the road that's a natural
foundation for the Cape Cod cottage Caroline's always talking about."
The bacteriologist prodded his shoulder tenderly. "Talking about it in Boston and building it in
northern CanadaтАФa little different, don't you think? You haven't married the gal yet."
"You don't know Caroline," Marquis told her confidently. "Besides, we'll be only forty miles from
Little FermiтАФand the town will grow. The lode we're working on seems to be about ten times as rich as
the Eldorado mine over at Port Radium. If it holds up, we'll build a uranium pile that will be a power plant
for the entire western hemisphere. Business will get in-terested, real-estate values will boom . . ."
"So it's a good investment, too? Now don't pout, but I have a dim belief that you bought the
swamp-happy acreage to give yourself a reason for this gaudy monstrosity you ordered when everyone
else got a 'copter. Why is it that physical scientists on both of the outermost frontiersтАФthe star-classifiers
and the electron-proddersтАФhave to be the roaringest romantics and mystics of them all? Like your
opinion that a lifetime spent behind Beacon Street cotton wool can produce the peculiar combi-nation of
frantic housemaid and lambent inspiration that you want in a wife."
 "Now you sound like that pill-roller Connor Kuntz when I beat his classic Capablancan chess with an
inspirational heresy. There's a nineteenth-century mechanist with whom you could be happy; all he wants
is a mate of good disposition and fair heredity who will be absorbed in her work and let him do his
bone-setting in peace. I don't want a mateтАФI want a marriage. No servant any employment agency ever
. . ."
"Dr. Kuntz is a mass of greasy rationalizations. And I wasn't proposing to you by indirection. You're
had, lad."
"тАФever sent out," he went on doggedly, "could handle the menial essentials of domestic living with
the affection and grace of a wife, a good wife. The best machines made stop this side of habit, and, even
if they didn't, you can't get omnipresent, under-standing love from a machine. Not that I'm marrying
Caroline just to get someone who'll kiss me while she's preparing dinners I like . . ."
"Of course not ! It's comfortable, though, to know you'll get it just the same. Which you wouldn't if
you married, sayтАФoh, say a female bacteriologist who had work of her own to do and would be as tired
as you at the end of the day. All this, mind you, even if you'd confided to the female bacteriologist that
you found her an ideal person with whom to discuss lab kinks and personal aspirations. Up with the
double standard; but, this time, keep it intellectual!"

The excessively thin young man slapped the car to a stop and turned with his mouth open for a blast.
Esther Sakarian was one of those tidy, docile-appearing women whose remarks generated a surprising
amount of frictional heat in men.
"Look here, Es," he began loudly, "social development and the relatively new integrity of the
individual to one side, people still consist of men and women. WomenтАФwith the exception of
maladjusted .. ."
"Hey, there!" Esther was staring over his shoulder with her nostrils flaring respectfully. "You've done
quite a job! It doesn't look a bit prefabricated, Paul. But it must have been expensive getting priorities for
those sections on the Diesel snow trains. And you banged it together in one week by your-self? Quite a
job!"
"I would appreciate it if you stopped raving and told me . . ."
"Your houseтАФyour Cape Cod cottage! It's perfect."