"Kim Stanley Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

would sit Joe beside him, or on his lap, and they would talk, and Joe was pretty
similar to his old self, babbling away at things outside the window or in his stroller,
or referring to events earlier in his day, telling semicoherent stories. It was hard to be
sure what he was talking about most of the time, although toys and teachers and the
other kids were clear enough, and formed the basis of most of his conversation.
But then they would walk home and enter the house, and life with Anna and Nick,
and often that was the last they would have to do with each other until bedtime.
SoтАФwho knew? It was not like the old days, with the vast stretches of the day, the
week, the season, extending before and behind them in a perpetual association not
unlike the lives of Siamese twins. Charlie now saw only fragmentary evidence. It was
hard to be sure of anything.
Nevertheless. He saw what he saw. Joe was not the same. And so, trapped at the
back of his mind (but always there) was the fear that he had somehow
misunderstood and asked for the wrong thing for his sonтАФand gotten it.



As the winter deepened it became more and more expensive to warm the entire
house. The price of heating oil became a political issue, but President Chase tried to
keep the focus on the alternative sources they needed to develop. At the QuiblersтАЩ,
Anna programmed the houseтАЩs thermostat to choreograph their evenings, so that
they congregated in the kitchen and living room in the early evenings, and then
bumped the heat upstairs in the hour before bedtime to augment whatever heat had
gathered there from below. It worked fairly well, following and reinforcing what they
would have done anyway. But one exceptionally cold night in early February the
power went out, and everything was suddenly different.
Anna had a supply of flashlights and candles in a cabinet in the dining room, and
quickly she banged her way to them and got some candles lit in every room. She
turned on a battery-powered radio, and Nick twiddled the dial trying to find some
news. While Charlie was building up the fire in the fireplace, they listened to a
crackly distant voice that said a cold front like one from the winter before had
dropped temperatures across New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey by up to
sixty degrees in twenty minutes, presumably causing a surge in demand or a
malfunction at some point in the grid, thus crashing the system.
тАЬIтАЩm glad we all got home in time,тАЭ Anna said. тАЬWe could have been in the Metro
somewhere.тАЭ
They could hear sirens beginning to oscillate through the air of the city. The Metro
had an emergency generating system, Charlie thought, but no doubt the streets were
clotted with cars, as they could see was true out on Wisconsin, just visible from their
front window. When Charlie stepped outside to get more firewood from their
screened-in porch, he smelled the smell of a power outage, unexpectedly familiar
from the winter before: exhaust of burned generator fuel, smoke of green firewood.
Inside the boys were clamoring for marshmallows. Anna had unearthed a bag of
them at the back of a kitchen cabinet. Anna passed on trying one, to JoeтАЩs
amazement, and went to the kitchen to whip up a late salad, keeping the refrigerator
door open for as short a time as possible, wondering as she did so how quickly an
unopened refrigerator would lose its chill. She resolved to buy a couple of
thermometers to find out. The information might come in useful.
Back in the living room, Charlie had finished lighting all the candles in the house, a
profligacy that created a fine glow, especially when they were set around the room