"Kate Wilhelm - Julian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilhelm Kate)

Julian

by Kate Wilhelm

Copyright (c)1977 Kate Wilhelm

First published in Analog Yearbook, ed. Ben Bova, 1977

THE YEAR Julian was twelve he received a telescope for Christmas. A telescope
in a great city is a particularly useless gift, he had learned. There had
been three nights since the first of the year, and this was May, when he had
been able to see the sky well enough to use it, and what little he had seen
he might have observed just as easily with his own eyes. The moon was good,
but he quickly became bored with looking at dark and light patches that could
have been craters, or clouds, or smudges on his lens. What the telescope was
good for was to observe the city.

The city climbed a hill in the section where Julian lived. His apartment
building was high enough for him to be able to look out over the roofs of
many buildings all the way to the river and up the hillside across it. He
could see small boats, fishing boats, tugs laboring with barges, people on
the bank walking, kissing, throwing stuff into the water.

In March a demolition crew had started to raze a tall gray office building a
block from Julian's window. All spring Julian had been plagued with a series
of minor complaints that had kept him out of school -- sore throats,
stomachaches, headaches. He had watched the destruction of the building from
start to finish. Now it was no more than a pile of trash. On this day Julian
had got up with a stomachache, and as soon as his parents had gone to work,
and his younger sister had left for school, he had got out his telescope to
watch the workmen with their bulldozers and cranes clean up the mess they had
made.

He swept the scene slowly, pausing to watch two men chug-a-lug from a
thermos, moved on to where a grader was pushing the trash into a heap of
different proportions. He raised the telescope to see what had been revealed
by the removal of the last wall, and there were tops of buildings, more
windows to investigate, the river, and on a hill across the river, revealed
to him for the first time, was a motel. It was a grand location, with a view
of the river below it and the city sprawling upward. He found the motel
swimming pool with no difficulty; there were two children playing in it, and
a woman nearby in a canvas chair. A man was cutting grass. A dog ran after
him opening its mouth, probably barking. The man stopped to pick up a stone
and throw it at the dog. There were seven cars in the parking area. Julian
began to examine the building itself.

There were three black women with cleaning carts, and a man with a tool box
who went into one of the rooms. He watched a maid run her vacuum cleaner in
four passes and then leave a room. There were two doors with Do Not Disturb
signs. He began to go down the row of second-floor rooms. The third one had