"Stanley G. Weinbaum - The Ideal" - читать интересную книгу автора (Weinbaum Stanley G)

huffily, "one might have a lower ideal of man than van Manderpootz. I see nothing nearly so humorous as
your situation."

The laughter died. I went miserably home, spent half the remainder of the night in morose contemplation,
smoked nearly two packs of cigarettes, and didn't get to the office at all the next day.


Tips Alva got back to town for a weekend broadcast, but I didn't even bother to see her, just phoned
her and told her I was sick. I guess my face lent credibility to the story, for she was duly sympathetic, and
her face in the phone screen was quite anxious. Even at that, I couldn't keep my eyes away from her lips
because, except for a bit too lustrous make-up, they were the lips of the ideal. But they weren't enough;
they just weren't enough.

Old N. J. began to worry again. I couldn't sleep late of mornings any more, and after missing that one
day, I kept getting down earlier and earlier until one morning I was only ten minutes late. He called me in
at once.

"Look here, Dixon," he said. "Have you been to a doctor recently?"

"I'm not sick," I said listlessly.

"Then for Heaven's sake, marry the girl! I don't care what chorus she kicks in, marry her and act like a
human being again."

"I can't."

"Oh. She's already married, eh?"

Well, I couldn't tell him she didn't exist. I couldn't say I was in love with a vision, a dream, an ideal. He
thought I was a little crazy, anyway, so I just muttered "Yeah," and didn't argue when he said gruffly:
"Then you'll get over it. Take a vacation. Take two vacations. You might as well for all the good you are
around here."

I didn't leave New York; I lacked the energy. I just mooned around the city for a while, avoiding my
friends, and dreaming of the impossible beauty of the face in the mirror. And by and by the longing to see
that vision of perfection once more began to become overpowering. I don't suppose anyone except me
can understand the lure of that memory; the face, you see, had been my ideal, my concept of perfection.
One sees beautiful woman here and there in the world; one falls in loveтАФbut always, no matter how
great their beauty or how deep one's love, they fall short in some degree of the secret vision of the ideal.
But not the mirrored face; she was my ideal, and therefore, whatever imperfections she might have had in
the minds of others, in my eyes she had none. None, that is, save the terrible one of being only an ideal,
and therefore unattainableтАФbut that is a fault inherent in all perfection.

It was a matter of days before I yielded. Common sense told me it was futile, even foolhardy, to gaze
again on the vision of perfect desirability. I fought against the hunger, but I fought hopelessly, and was not
at all surprised to find myself one evening rapping on van Manderpootz's door in the University Club. He
wasn't there; I'd been hoping he wouldn't be, since it gave me an excuse to seek him in his laboratory in
the Physics Building to which I would have dragged him anyway.

There I found him, writing some sort of notations on the table that held the idealizator. "Hello, Dixon," he