"Oltion-Uncertainty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

JERRY OLTION

UNCERTAINTY

Jason is excited as he parks the demonstrator LeBaron in front of his house. He
parks on the street so his neighbors can see it, and maybe decide to buy one.
That's not likely, but it's possible, and a car salesman plays the odds. If you
greet enough customers, put the cars in front of enough people, someone will buy
one. As they have done today. A brand new Imperial, cash, and Jason already has
the commission check in his breast pocket.

He fingers the crisp paper as he walks up the driveway to the door. Yes, still
there. And just before Christmas. Ginny will be pleased. He tries the doorknob
before he goes for his house keys, but it is locked. Not a good sign. If Ginny
were home, she would have left it open for him, maybe even met him at the door.
Unless she got caught up in something and forgot the time. That's happened
before. So Jason sets his briefcase on the concrete step and fishes in his
pocket for the keys, unlocks the door, and as he steps into the darkened house
he says loudly, hopefully, "Honey, I'm home!"

The silent house returns not even an echo. Jason switches on the kitchen light
and takes a cautious sniff. NO aroma of freshly baked bread, no meaty heaviness
of a roast or even a hamburger casserole. The wave function has collapsed, the
universe has chosen. Ginny is not home today.

She might have been. That's the most frustrating aspect of the whole thing.
Until Jason checked to see, she might have been right here in this kitchen,
wanting him as eagerly as he wanted her, but the very act of arriving was enough
to set the universal dice in motion and tonight they came up snake-eyes.

He turns around and steps outside again, closing the door behind him. A virtual
couple pops into being on the sidewalk beside his car, a teenage boy and girl
walking arm-in-arm. She nods at something he says, then laughs. They take three
steps before vanishing, their very existence swallowed in the quantum foam.

Jason shivers and opens the door again, but Ginny is still gone. He knew she
would be; the universe can't be fooled that easily.

He sets the commission check on the kitchen table and plods through the house,
shedding briefcase, shoes, tie, and the rest of his clothing along the way into
the bedroom, where he collapses backward on the bed and stares at the ceiling.
The lunar landscape of its textured surface is dimly lit from the evening light
filtering through the window overlooking the back yard. Jason tells himself that
the ceiling is a good metaphor for his life, that the even pattern of bumps up
there results from the same randomness that haunts his marriage. The carpenter
who made the ceiling had no idea where each speck of grout would go; he just
sprayed them upward in a great shower of mud, and the overall, aggregate pattern
of those thousands of flying particles turned out to have a kind of order to