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

November 25 тАФEnola came today, but without bringing the brandy. She is going to Bath fo
holidays to see her aunt. At least she will be away from the raids for awhile. I will not have to w
about her. She finished the story of her brother and told me she hopes to persuade this aunt to
Tom for the duration of the Blitz but is not at all sure the aunt will be willing.
Young Tom is apparently not so much an engaging scape-grace as a near-criminal. He has
caught twice picking pockets in the Bank tube shelter, and they have had to go back to Marble A
I comforted her as best I could, told her all boys were bad at one time or another. What I r
wanted to say was that she needn't worry at all, that young Tom strikes me as a true survivor
like my own tom, like Langby, totally unconcerned with anybody but himself, well equippe
survive the Blitz and rise to prominence in the future.
Then I asked her whether she had gotten the brandy.
She looked down at her open-toed shoes and muttered un-happily, "I thought you'd forgotte
about that."
I made up some story about the watch taking turns buying a bottle, and she seemed less unha
but I am not convinced she will not use this trip to Bath as an excuse to do nothing. I will hav
leave St. Paul's and buy it myself, and I don't dare leave Langby alone in the church. I made
promise to bring the brandy today before she leaves. But she is still not back, and the sirens
already gone.

November 26 тАФNo Enola, and she said their train left at noon. I suppose I should be grateful
at least she is safely out of London. Maybe in Bath she will be able to get over her cold.
Tonight one of the ARP girls breezed in to borrow half our cots and tell us about a mess ov
the East End where a surface shelter was hit. Four dead, twelve wounded. "At least it wasn't on
the tube shelters!" she said. "Then you'd see a real mess, wouldn't you?"

November 30 тАФI dreamed I took the cat to St. John's Wood.
"Is this a rescue mission?" Dunworthy said.
"No, sir," I said proudly. "I know what I was supposed to find in my practicum. The pe
survivor. Tough and re-sourceful and selfish. This is the only one I could find. I had to kill Lan
you know, to keep him from burning down St. Paul's. Enola's brother has gone to Bath, and
others will never make it. Enola wears open-toed shoes in the winter and sleeps in the tubes and
her hair up on metal pins so it will curl. She cannot possibly survive the Blitz."
Dunworthy said, "Perhaps you should have rescued her instead. What did you say her n
was?"
"Kivrin," I said, and woke up cold and shivering.
 December 5 тАФI dreamed Langby had the pinpoint bomb. He carried it under his arm l
brown-paper parcel, coming out of St. Paul's Station and up Ludgate Hill to the west doors.
"This is not fair," I said, barring his way with my arm. "There is no fire watch on duty."
He clutched the bomb to his chest like a pillow. "That is your fault," he said, and before I c
get to my stirrup pump and bucket, he tossed it in the front door.
The pinpoint was not even invented until the end of the twentieth century, and it was anothe
years before the dis-possessed Communists got hold of it and turned it into something that coul
carried under your arm. A parcel that could blow a quarter-mile of the City into oblivion. Thank
that is one dream that cannot come true.
It was a sunlit morning in the dream, and this morning when I came off watch the sun was sh
for the first time in weeks. I went down to the crypt and then came up again, making the round
the roofs twice more, then the steps and the grounds and all the treacherous alleyways betw
where an incendiary could be missed. I felt better after that, but when I got to sleep I dreamed a
this time of fire and Langby watching it, smiling.