"Spider Robinson - C2 - Timetravellers Strictly Cash" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

right? A dreadful error! Never been so scared in my life. I'm walking on tippy-toe, looking in
every doorway I pass and trying to look insolvent, and the burning question in my mind is, 'Are
the crosstown buses still running?' Because if they are, I can catch one a block away that'll take
me to bright lights and safety-but I've forgotten bow late the crosstown bus keeps running in this
part of town. It's my onJy hope. I keep on walking, scared as hell. And when I get to the bus
stop, there, leaning up against a mailbox, is the biggest, meanest-looking, ugliest, blackest man
I have ever seen in my life. Head shaved, three days' worth of beard, big scar on his face, hands
in his pockets."
Not a sound in the joint.
"So the essential thing is not to let them know you're scared. I put a big grin on my
face, and I walk right up to him and I stammer, 'Uh. . . crosstown bus run all night long?' And
the fella goes . . . " Tommy' mimed a ferocious looking giant with his hands in his pockets. Then
suddenly he yanked them out, clapped them rhythmically, and sang, "Doo-dah, doo-dah!"
The whole bar dissolved in laughter.
". . . fella whipped out a joint, and we both got high while we waited for the bus," he
went on, and the laughter redoubled. Tommy finished his beer and cocked the empty. "So my toast is
to prejudice," he finished, and pegged the glass square into the hearth, and the laughter became a
standing ovation. Isham Latimer, who is the exact color of recording tape, came over and gave
Tommy a beer, a grin, and some skin.
Suddenly I thought I understood something, and it filled me with-shame.
Perhaps in my self-involvement I was wrong. I had not seen the Doc communicate in any way
with Long-Drink or Tommy, nor had the toasters seemed to notice me at all. But all at once it
seemed suspicious that both men, both proud men, had picked tonight to stand up and
uncharacteristically tell egg-on-my-face anecdotes. Damn Doc Webster! I had been trying so hard to
keep my pain off my face, so determined to get my toast made and get home without bringing my
friends down.
Or was I, with the egotism of the wounded, reading too much into a couple of good
anecdotes well told? I wanted to bear the next toast. I turned around to set my beer down so I
could prop my face up on both fists, and was stunned out of my self-involvement, and was further


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ashamed.

It was inconceivable that I could have sat next to her for a full fifteen minutes without
noticing her-anywhere in the world, let alone at Callahan's Place.
I worked the night shift in a hospital once, pushing a broom. The only new faces you see
are the ones they wheel into Emergency. There are two basic ways people react facially to mortal
agony. The first kind smiles a lot, slightly apologetically, thanks everyone elaborately for small
favors, extravagantly praises the hospital md its every employee.
The face is animated, trying to ensure that the last impression it leaves before going under the
knife is of a helluva nice person whom it would be a shame to lose. The second kind is absolutely
blank-faced, so utterly wrapped up in wondering whether he's dying that he has no attention left
for working the switches and levers of the face-or so certain of death that the perpetual dialogue
people conduct with their faces has ceased to interest him. It's not the total deaniination of a
corpse's face, butit's not far from it.
Her face was of the second type. I suppose it could have been cancer or some such, but
somehow I knew her pain was not physical. I was just as sure that it might be fatal. I was so