"Pohl, Frederik - Best of Frederik Pohl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

I called, "Lilymary!"
She faltered and half-turned. I had counted on that. You could tell she wasn't brought up in this country; from the age of six on, our girls learn Lesson One: When you're walking alone at night, don't stop.
She didn't stop long. She peered into the doorway and saw me, and her expression changed as though I had hit her with a club. "George," she said, and hesitated, and walked on. Her hair was a shimmering rainbow in the Christmas lights.
We were only a few doors from her house. I glanced, halfapprehensive, at the door, but no Father Hargreave was there to scowl. I followed her and said, "Please, Lilymary. Can't we just talk for a moment?"
She faced me. "Why?"
"To-" I swallowed. "To let me apologize."
She said gently, "No apology is necessary, George. We're different breeds of cats. No need to apologize for that."
"Please."
"Well," she said. And then, "Why not?"
We found a bench in the little park across from the subway entrance. It was late; enormous half-tracks from the Sanitation Department were emptying trash cans, sprinkler trucks came by and we had to raise our feet off the ground. She said once, "I really ought to get back. I was only going to the store." But she stayed.
Well, I apologized, and she listened like a lady. And like a lady she said, again, "There's nothing to apologize for." And that was that, and I still hadn't said what I had come for. I didn't know how.
I brooded over the problem. With the rumble of the trash trucks
and the roar of their burners, conversation was difficult enough anyhow. But even under those handicaps, I caught a phrase from Lilymary. "-back to the jungle," she was saying. "It's home for us, George. Father can't wait to get back, and neither ~an the girls."
I interruped her. "Get back?"
She glanced at me. "That's what I said." She nodded at the Sanitation workers, baling up the enormous drifts of Christmas cards, thrusting them into the site burners. "As soon as the mails open up," she said, "and Father gets his visa. It was mailed a week ago, they say. They tell me that in the Christmas rush it might take two or three weeks more to get to us, though."
Something was clogging up my throat. All I could say was, "Why?" Lilymary sighed. "It's where we live, George," she explained. "This isn't right for us. We're mission brats and we belong out in the field, spreading the Good News. . . . Though Father says you people need it more than the Dyaks." She looked quickly into my eyes. "I mean-"
I waved it aside. I took a deep breath. "Lilymary," I said, all in a rush, "will you marry me?"
Silence, while Lilymary looked at me.
"Oh, George," she said, after a moment. And that was all; but I was able to translate it; the answer was no.

Still, proposing marriage is something like buying a lottery ticket; you may not win the grand award, but there are consolation prizes. Mine was a date.
Lilymary stood up to her father, and I was allowed in the house. I wouldn't say I was welcomed, but Dr. Hargreave was polite- distant, but polite. He offered me coffee, he spoke of the dream superstitions of the Dyaks and old days in the Long House, and when Lilymary was ready to go he shook my hand at the door.
We had dinner. - . . I asked her-but as a piece of conversation, not a begging plea from the heart-I asked her why they had to go back. The Dyaks, she said; they were Father's people; they needed him. Alter Mother's death, Father had wanted to come back to America . . . but it was wrong for them. He was going back. The girls, naturally, were going with him.
We danced. . . . I kissed her, in the shadows, when it was growing late. She hesitated, but she kissed me back.
I resolved to destroy my dreamster; its ersatz ecstasies were pale.
"There," she said, as she drew back, and her voice was gentle, with
a note of laughter. "I just wanted to show you. It isn't all hymnsinging back on Borneo, you know."
I reached out for her again, but she drew back, and the laughter was gone. She glanced at her watch.
"Time for me to go, George," she said. "We start packing tomorrow."
"But-"
"It's time to go, George," she said. And she kissed me at her door; but she didn't invite me in.
I stripped the tapes off my dreamster and threw them away. But hours later, after the fiftieth attempt to get to sleep, and the twentieth solitary cigarette, I got up and turned on the light and looked for them again.
They were pale; but they were all I had.

Party Week! The store was nearly bare. A messenger from the Credit Department came staggering in with a load of files just as the closing gong sounded.
He dropped them on my desk. "Thank God!" he said fervently. "Guess you won't be bothering with these tonight, eh, Mr. Martin?"
But I searched through them all the same. He looked at me wonderingly, but the clerks were breaking out the bottles and the runners from the lunchroom were bringing up sandwiches, and he drifted away.
I found the credit check I had requested. "Co-Maker Required!" was stamped at the top, and triply underlined in red, but that wasn't what I was looking for. I hunted through the text until I found what I wanted to know: "Subject is expected to leave this country within forty-eight hours. Subject's employer is organized and incorporated under laws of State of New York as a religious mission group. No earnings record on file. Caution: Subject would appear a bad credit risk, due to-"
I read no farther. Forty-eight hours!
There was a scrawl at the bottom of the page, in the Credit Manager's own handwriting: "George, what the devil are you up to? This is the fourth check we made on these people!"
It was true enough; but it would be the last. In forty-eight hours they would be gone.
I was dull at the Christmas Party. But it had been a splendid Christmas for the store, and in an hour everyone was too drunk to notice.

I decided to skip Party Week. I stayed at home the next morning,
staring out the window. It had begun to snow, and the cleaners were dragging away old Christmas trees. It's always a letdown when Christmas is over; but my mood had nothing to do with the season, only with Lilymary and the numbers of miles from her&to Borneo.
I circled the date in red on my calendar: December 25th. By the 26th they would be gone. .
But I couldn't, repeat couldn't, let her go so easily. It wasn't that I wanted to try again, and be rebuffed again; it was not a matter of choice. I had to see her. Nothing else, suddenly, had any meaning. So I made the long subway trek out there, knowing it was a fool's errand. But what kind of an errand could have been more appropriate for me?
They weren't home, but I wasn't going to let that stop me. I banged on the door of the next apartment, and got a surly, suspicious, whatdo-you-want-with-them? inspection from the woman who lived there. But she thought they might possibly be down at the Community Center on the next block.
And they were.