"William Morrison - Date of Publication 2083 AD" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

 "No." He leaned back, waiting for her to guess again.
"I'm sure I haven't any idea who it was," she said. "But does it matter? According to BarbaraтАФ"
"It was Reardon, the cop. You know, the one with the stomach."
"Reardon?" She stared at him. "Why, he's been chasing them off that lot every day. He hates kids.
You must be mistaken."
"I'm not mistaken. He was catching there, acting like a kid himself, when who should come along out
of a police car but Lieutenant Puffinger from the local precinct.
Well, you should have heard him when he saw what Reardon was doing. I'll bet those kids learned a
few words they didn't know before. It seems that Reardon hadn't made his call from the street box and
the cars were scouting around trying to find out what had become of him. And here he was playing
baseball!"
"Imagine that!" said Carrie. But her heart was still elsewhere. She said, "Barbara says ..."
So they talked of how much money to send' Barbara. And Carrie thought that nobody could tell her
how to manage a husband. You pretended to listen to him and whatever he said you let go in one ear and
out the other, while you kept your mind on the really important thing. But she was to remember Reardon
later.

The next day there was a rumpus at the school. What happened there was even more incredible than
the doings of Reardon. The local Superintendent was proud of his neatly operated educational system,
and had set that date for showing around a group of distinguished visitors.
Neither the newspapers nor Carrie ever managed to get straight at exactly what point things had
begun to go wrong. When they tried to trace the events of that day practically all the distinguished
visitors, including two college presidents, the president of the Board of Education, a Professor of
Educational Psychology and two heads of Normal Schools gave different and conflicting stories.
What did come out, however, was that all six visitors had distinguished themselves in a quite
unexpected way. They had run around the school madly waving torches and yelling, "Down with school!
Down with school! Burn the place down!"
The firemen had arrived in time to prevent much damage but the incendiaries had been rounded up
only with great difficulty after school had been dismissed. The President of the Board of Education had
beaten up the Superintendent and the two college presidents had ganged up on one of the hastily
summoned policemen. Later on they could give no reason for why they had done so.
"It's a crazy world," thought Carrie wisely. "You never know what sort of lunatic you'll run into next."
And then she put it out of her mind and turned to a more important problem. What could she have for
dinner that night that would please Bill and not make him say, "You know I never eat spinach,"тАФ or
broccoli or her new sauce or whatever it was he was never eating that week?
All the same it didn't surprise her greatly when Bill came home the day after and said, "You'll never
guess what happened at the office."
"Somebody else went crazy."
"Nobody went crazy. We all slept."
"What?"
"We all slept. At ten o'clock Mr. Elvergard came in and said, 'All right, boys and girls, we've been
working too hard, all of us. Let's take a nice long rest today, shall we? Put your pretty little heads on your
pretty little desks. One, two, three, snooze!' "
"You're joking!"
"Cross my heart and hope to die. We all fell asleep and we stayed asleep till four-thirty and then he
woke us up and sent us home early so we wouldn't get caught in the worst of the subway rush."
Carrie looked at him and said absolutely nothing. What had happened at school had been bad
enough. But this was absolutely incredible. There were times when Bill was a great kidder and she wasn't
sure whether to take him seriously or not. This appeared to be one of the times when he was not to be
taken seriously. Even if there were the faintest chance that he was telling the truth she thought it best not