"Theodore Sturgeon - That Low" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

himself. So be got a piece of rope and made a noose and
put it around his neck. He tied the other end to the leg of
the radiator and jumped out of the window. He was a big
man, but the rope held all right. However, the leg broke off
the radiator, and he fell six stories. He hit a canvas marquee,
tore through it, and fell heavily to the sidewalk. There was
quite a crowd there, after a I while, to listen to the noises he
made because of what was broken.
Fowler took a while to mend, and spent it in careful thought. He took no
comfort from his thoughts, for they were honest ones, and be did not care at
all for his conclusions, which drafted a portrait no one would admire and an
insight no one would want as a bedfellow. He got through it though, and put a
list of his obligations down on paper

and drew up a plan for taking care of things. It was a plan that was within
his capabilities and meant chip, chip, chip for a long, long, time before he
could ever call himself honestly broke again. The first person he tried it out
on was the business manager of the hospital, and to his immense surprise it
worked: that is, he wouldn't get sued for the bill, and the hospital would go
along with him until it was all straightened out. Nobody had ever given him
that much of a break before; but then, he had never tackled a problem this way
before.
He got out of the hospital and began chipping.

Mrs. Hallowell bad a bad moment over Fowler. She started up out of her sleep
one night, thinking about him.
"Oh, how awful," she said. "I made a mistake!"
She phoned in the morning. Fowler was not there. Mrs. Hallowell phoned and
phoned around until she got someone who could tell her about Fowler. The
tenant in the apartment next to Fowler's bad made a mistake about a gas
heater, and had a bad cold, and lit a match, and blew the end of the building
out. Fowler had been picked up from the wreckage, bleeding. The someone said,
"Is there any message I could send to him?"
"No," said Mrs. Hallowell. "No. Not . . . now."
They saved Fowler that time, too. It was a lot of trouble. They had to take
this and that off, and the other out. He was put, finally, in a very short bed
with a mass of equipment beside him, humming and clicking. It circulated
fluids, and another part of it dripped into a tube, and there was a thing that
got emptied a couple of times a day without Fowler's worrying about it.
That was the trouble with Mrs. Hallowell's talent. It lay in such broad lines.
A mistake could cover a lot of territory.

Fowler gradually became aware of her mistake. It took him about two months.
People came by and clucked their tongues when they saw him. There was a
bright-eyed, dry-faced old lady who put flowers near him every week or so. He
didn't have to go on with that chip, chip, pay, pay any more. Everybody was
sorry for him, and everybody always would be, as long as be lived, which would
be very nearly as long as the equipment could be kept running. A long time. A
long life. Mrs. Hallowell bad been right, dead right, about the long life.
Where she made her mistake was in thinking that he would be unhappy.