"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

straightforward, usually involving platforms for convenience; the belays and T-bars and dashboards and
other gear had been bombproof. His fellow workers had been a mixed bag, as was always true with
climbersтАФeverything from nearly illiterate cowboys to eccentric scholars of Nietzsche or Adam Smith.
And the window work itself had been a funny thing, what the Nietzsche scholar had called the apotheosis
of kindergarten skills, very satisfying to performтАФslicing out old caulk, applying heated caulk, unscrewing
and screwing screws and bolts, sticking giant suckers to panes, levering them out and winching them up
to the roofs or onto the platformsтАФand all under the cool onrush of the marine layer, just under clouds all
mixed together with bright sun, so that it was warm when it was sunny, cool when it was cloudy, and the
whole spread of downtown San Diego there below to entertain him when he wasnтАЩt working. Often he
had felt surges of happiness, filling him in moments when he stopped to look around: a rare thing in his
life.

Eventually the repetition got boring, as it will, and he had moved on, first to go traveling, until the money
he had saved was gone; then back into academia again, as a sort of test, in a different lab, with a different
advisor, at a different university. Things had gone better there. Eventually he had ended up back at
UCSD, back in San DiegoтАФhis childhood home, and still the place where he felt most comfortable on
this Earth.

He actually noticed that feeling as he left the airport terminalтАЩs glassed-in walkway over the street, and
hopped down the outdoor escalator to the rental car shuttles. The comfort of a primate on home ground,
no doubtтАФa familiarity in the slant of the light and the shape of the hills, but above all in the air itself, the
way it felt on his skin, that combination of temperature, humidity, and salinity that together marked it as
particularly San Diegan. It was like putting on familiar old clothes after spending a year in a tux; he was
home, and his cells knew it.

He got in his rental car (always the same one, it seemed) and drove out of the lot. North on the freeway,
crowded but not impossibly so, people zipping along like starlings, following the flocking ruleskeep as far
apart from the rest as possible andchange speeds as little as possible. The best drivers in the world. Past
Mission Bay and Mount Soledad on the left, into the region where every off-ramp had been a major
feature of his life at one time or another. Off at Gilman, up the tight canyon of apartments hanging over
the freeway, past the one where he had once spent a night with a girl, ah, back in the days when such
things had happened to him. Down a hill and onto campus.

UCSD. Home base. The school in the eucalyptus grove. Quick-witted, sophisticated, scarily
powerfulтАФeven from inside it, Frank remained impressed by the place. Among other things it was a very
effective troop of primates, collaborating to further the welfare of its members.

Even after a year in the East CoastтАЩs great hardwood forest, there was something appealing about the
campusтАЩs eucalyptus groveтАФsomething charming, even soothing. The trees had been planted as a
railroad-tie farm, before it was discovered that the wood was unsuitable. Now they formed a kind of
mathematically gridded space, within which the architectural m├йlange of UCSDтАЩs colleges lay scattered,
connected by two broad promenades that ran north and south.

Frank had arranged an afternoon of appointments. The department had given him the use of an empty
office facing the Revelle Plaza; his own was still occupied by a visiting researcher from Berlin. After
getting the key from Rosaria, the department secretary, he sat at a dusty desk by a functioning phone,
and discussed dissertation progress with his four remaining graduate students. Forty-five minutes each,
and aware the whole time that he really wasnтАЩt doing them justice, that it had been their bad luck to get
him as their advisor, because of his decision to go to NSF for a year. Well, he would try to make up for
it on his returnтАФbut not all at once, and certainly not today. The truth was that none of their projects