"Pohl, Frederik - Rem The Rememberer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

And Rem went back to his own room and to bed.
He didn't mind going to sleep. After all, he was pleasantly tired. He did mind
the dreams. He remembered them clearly; and they were always the same, and
always so real, not as though he were falling asleep but as though he were
waking...
He woke up happy, with the vanishing clouds of a happy dream in his mind. Then
the rattle and rasp of the air conditioner in his room chased the last of the
dream away. By the time he got up and turned his little light on-he always
needed one, even in the summer, because the skies were almost always dingy
dark-he could remember the dream, but he couldn't feel it anymore.
His mother, Peg, worried about the way he always seemed to dream the same
wishful dream, but when Rem realized that, he just stopped telling her about it.
He did ask her if he could please leave the air conditioner off, at least in the
winter, so that he could wake up more slowly and enjoy the dream more. "I wish
you could, honey, she said, "but you know Dr. Dallinger said you had to have
something filter the air, because of your asthma. I'm sorry about the noise.
Maybe we can get you a new one- Although I don't know how, with the payments on
the cars and the way heat's going up. And you wouldn't believe what I spent in
the supermarket yesterday, just for three little bags of groceries. Then she
laughed and hugged him and said, "A noisy air conditioner isn't so bad! What if
you had to live in New York City?
She was the one who drove him in to school every day. His father had to leave an
hour earlier because of the traffic. School wasn't bad. Rem liked to learn, and
he liked being with the other children. He even liked recess, at least in the
winter, when the storm winds from Canada blew some of the sulfur-smelling smog
away and the reek from the slow, iridescent waves of Long Island Sound was not
so strong. He didn't mind the cold. He did mind being kept inside so much of the
time, when the air index was "Unsatisfactory or "Dangerous to Health or even,
which had happened two or three times the previous summer, "Condition Red! No
burning! No driving! On days like that everybody was stuck wherever he happened
to be. Everything stopped. Rem and his mother would take turns in the shower and
then sit, playing cards, or talking, or just resting, waiting for the time to
pass. If his father was lucky, he would be doing the same thing in his office in
the city. If he wasn't, he might be caught in the long unmoving snarl of cars on
the freeways, waiting for permission to start again. That was how Rem's uncle
Marc had died, two years before, when he had another heart attack sitting at the
wheel and got out of the car for help, and died there.
But then after a while the rain would come. it was worse than the dry heat at
first, because the drops would come down as sticky black blobs that stained all
the houses, dirtied the windows, and killed the grass, where there was any
grass. But after a while there might be a real storm, with luck even a
hurricane, and then for a few days Long Island might look queerly green and
fresh for a while.
What Rem liked best was the one or two evenings a week when his father got home
before his bedtime. They would talk about grown-up things.
Rem's father, Burt, was very proud of him. He told his wife, "Rem's really
interested in things-important things; I think he's going to be somebody the
world will be glad to have when he grows up. One of the "important things was
why the Sound was dead and unhealthy. Another was why everybody drove their own
cars instead of riding trains or buses, or even working near where they lived.