"Connie Willis - Fire Watch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

was The Worker. A Nazi newspaper?

November 2 -I've been up on the roofs for a week straight, helping some incompetent work
patch the hole the bomb made. They're doing a terrible job. There's still a great gap on one s
man could fall into, but they insist it'll be all right because, after all, you wouldn't fall clear thr
but only as far as the ceiling, and "the fall can't kill you." They don't seem to understand it's a pe
hiding place for an incendiary.
And that is all Langby needs. He does not even have to set a fire to destroy St. Paul's. A
needs to do is let one burn uncaught until it is too late.
I could not get anywhere with the workmen. I went down into the church to complain to Matt
and saw Langby and his tourist behind a pillar, close to one of the windows. Langby was hold
newspaper and talking to the man. When I came down from the library an hour later, they were
there. So is the gap. Matthews says we'll put planks across it and hope for the best.

November 5 -I have given up trying to retrieve. I am so far behind on my sleep I can't
retrieve information on a newspaper whose name I already know. Double watches the perma
thing now. Our chars have abandoned us altogether (like the cat), so the crypt is quiet, but I ca
sleep.
If I do manage to doze off, I dream. Yesterday I dreamed Kivrin was on the roofs, dressed l
saint. "What was the secret of your practicum?" I said. "What were you supposed to find out?"
She wiped her nose with a handkerchief and said, "Two things: One, that silence and humilit
the sacred burdens of the historian. Two," she stopped and sneezed into the handkerchief. "D
sleep in the tubes."
My only hope is to get hold of an artificial and induce a trance. That's a problem. I'm positiv
too early for chemi-cal endorphins and probably hallucinogens. Alcohol is defi-nitely available,
need something more concentrated than ale, the only alcohol I know by name. I do not dare as
watch. Langby is suspicious enough of me already. It's back to the OED, to look up a word I
know.

November 11 -The cat's back. Langby was out with Allen again, still trying for the asbestos c
so I thought it was safe to leave St. Paul's. I went to the grocer's for supplies and hopefully
artificial. It was late, and the sirens sounded before I had even gotten to Cheapside, but the raid
not usually start until after dark. It took awhile to get all the gro-ceries and to get up my courag
ask whether he had any alcohol-he told me to go to a pub-and when I came out of the shop, it
as if I had pitched suddenly into a hole.
I had no idea where St. Paul's lay, or the street, or the shop I had just come from. I stood on
was no longer the sidewalk, clutching my brown-paper parcel of kippers and bread with a ha
could not have seen if I held it up before my face. I reached up to wrap my muffler closer abou
neck and prayed for my eyes to adjust, but there was no re-duced light to adjust to. I would
been glad of the moon, for all St. Paul's watch curses it and calls it a fifth columnist. Or a bus,
its shuttered headlights giving just enough light to orient myself by. Or a searchlight. Or the kick
flare of an ack-ack gun. Anything.
Just then I did see a bus, two narrow yellow slits a long way off. I started toward it and n
pitched off the curb. Which meant the bus was sideways in the street, which meant it was not a
A cat meowed, quite near, and rubbed against my leg. I looked down into the yellow lights I
thought belonged to the bus. His eyes were picking up light from somewhere, though I would
sworn there was not a light for miles, and reflecting it flatly up at me.
"A warden'll get you for those lights, old torn," I said, and then as a plane droned overhead,
jerry."
The world exploded suddenly into light, the searchlights and a glow along the Thames seemin