"Resnick, Mike - Myron Blumberg, Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

firemen have left.
"I didn't," I say. "It's just that my flame seems to be
getting bigger every day."
"While our bank account is getting smaller," she says.
"Either you get a job, or you'll have ask your brother Sidney for
a loan."
It is an easy choice, because when Sidney dies they will need
a crowbar to pry his fingers off the first dollar he ever made,
and every subsequent one as well, so I go out to look for work.

#

You would be surprised at how difficult it is for an honest,
industrious dragon to find work in our neighborhood. Stuart
Kominsky puts me on as a sand-blaster, but when I melt the stone
he fires me after only half a day on the job. Herbert Baumann says
maybe I could give kids rides on my back when he reopens the
carnival, but it is closed until next spring. Phil Rosenheim,
who has never struck me as a bigot before, says he won't hire
anyone with green skin. Muriel Weinstein tells me she'd be happy
to take me on just in case some out-of-town dragons come by to
look at some of her real estate listings, and she'll call me the
moment that happens, but somehow I know that she won't.
Finally I latch on with Milt Fein's heating company. Winter's
coming on and he's short-handed, and when a furnace goes out he
pays me seventeen dollars an hour to go to the scene and breathe
into the vents and keep the building warm until he can get there
and solve the problem. The first week I make $562.35, which is
more than I have ever made in my life, and the second week we are
so busy I get time-and-a-half on the weekend and take home almost
seven hundred dollars, and Sylvia is so happy that she buys a new
dress and dyes her hair bright red.

#

And just when I am thinking that things are too good to last,
it turns out that things _are_ too good to last.
One day I start breathing into the ventillation shaft in an
office building, and nothing happens, except that Milt Fein lays
me off.
Two days later I wake up and I have hands again, and the next
morning most of my scales are gone.
"I knew it!" screams Sylvia. "You finally find something
you're good at, and then you decide not to be a dragon any
longer!"
"I didn't exactly _decide_," I say. "It just kind of
happened."
"Why are you doing this to me, Myron?" she demands.
"I'm not doing anything," I say. "I seem to be _un_doing."
"This is terrible," she says. "Look at you: you're hardly