"William Tenn - Wednesday's Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

a real puppy-love crush on Sandra; this other girl is somebody I just met, like I told you, and I don't feel
anything for her, one way or the other."
The young doctor grinned. "So you come up to my office and have a consultation about her! Well,
it's your funeral. What do you want to know?"
"What causes all theseтАФthese physical peculiarities?"
Dr. Rudd got up and sat on the edge of his desk. "First," he said, "whether you want to recognize it
or not, she's a highly disturbed person. The hysterics in the restaurant point to it, and the fantastic
nonsense she told you about her body points to it. So right there, you have something. If only one percent
of what she told you is trueтАФand even that I would say is pretty highтАФit makes sense in terms of
psychosomatic imbalance. Medicine doesn't yet know quite how it works, but one thing seems certain:
anyone badly mixed up mentally is going to be at least a little mixed up physically, too."
Fabian thought about that for a while. "Jim, you don't know what it means to those little secretaries
in the pool to tell lies to the office manager! A fib or two about why they were absent the day before,
yes, but not stories like this, not to me"
A shrug. "I don't know what you look like to them: I don't work for you, Fabe. But none of what
you say would hold true for a psycho. And a psycho is what I have to consider her. Look, some of that
stuff she told you is impossible, some of it has oc-curred in medical literature. There have been
well-authenticated cases of people, for example, who have grown several sets of teeth in their lifetime.
These are biological sports, one-in-a-million individuals. But the rest of it? And all the rest of it
happen-ing to one person? Please."
"I saw some of it. I saw the hairs on her fingernails."
"You saw something on her fingernails. It could be any one of a dozen different possibilities. I'm sure
of one thing; it wasn't hair. Right there she gave herself away as phony. Goddammit, man, hair and nails
are the same organs essentially. One doesn't grow on the other!"
"And the navel? The missing navel?"
Jim Rudd dropped to his feet and strode rapidly about the office. "I wish I knew why I'm wasting so
much time with you," he complained. "A human being without a navel, or any mammal without a navel, is
as possible as an insect with a body tem-perature of ninety-eight degrees. It just can't be. It does not
exist."
He seemed to get more and more upset as he considered it. He kept shaking his head negatively as
he walked.
Fabian suggested: "Suppose I brought her to your office. And suppose you exam-ined her and
found no navel. Now just consider that for a moment. What would you say then?"
"I'd say plastic surgery," the doctor said instantly. "Mind you, I'm positive she'd never submit to such
an examination, but if she did, and there was no navel, plastic surgery would be the only answer."
"Why would anyone want to do plastic surgery on a navel?"
"I don't know. I haven't the vaguest idea. Maybe an accident. Maybe a disfiguring birthmark in that
place. But there will be scars, let me tell you. She had to be born with a navel"
Rudd went back to his desk. He picked up a prescription pad. "Let me give you the name of a good
psychiatrist, Fabe. I've thought ever since that Sandra business that you've had some personal problems
that might get out of hand one day. This man is one of the finestтАФ"
Fabian left.


She was obviously in a flutter when he called to pick her up that night, so much more of a flutter than a
date-with-the-boss would account for, that Fabian was puzzled. But he waited and gave her an
ostentatious and expensive good time. Afterward, after dinner and after the theater, when they were
sitting in the corner of a small night club over their drinks, he asked her about it.
"You don't date much, do you, Wednesday?"
"No, I don't, Mr. BalikтАФI mean, Fabian," she said, smiling shyly as she remem-bered the first-name