"Robert Charles Wilson - Divided by Infinity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robert Charles)

paper bag from his parchment hand, feeling faintly guilty.
тАЬPerhaps youтАЩll come back,тАЭ he said.
тАЬIтАЩd like to.тАЭ
тАЬAnytime,тАЭ Ziegler said, inching toward his bead curtain and
the musty stairway behind it, back into the cloying dark. тАЬAnything
youтАЩre looking for, I can help you find it.тАЭ


Crossing College Street, freighted with groceries, I stepped
into the path of a car, a yellow Hyundai racing a red light. The
driver swerved around me, but it was a near thing. The wheel wells
brushed my trouser legs. My heart stuttered a beat.
тАж and I died, perhaps, a small infinity of times.
Probabilities collapse. I become increasingly unlikely.
тАЬImmersed in the strange,тАЭ Ziegler had said.
But had I ever wanted that? Really wanted that?


тАЬBe careful,тАЭ Lorraine told me one evening in the long month
before she died. Amazingly, she had seemed to think of it as my
tragedy, not hers. тАЬDonтАЩt despise life.тАЭ
Difficult advice.
Did I тАЬdespise lifeтАЭ? I think I did not; that is, there were
times when the world seemed a pleasant enough place, times when
a cup of coffee and a morning in the sun seemed good enough
reasons to continue to draw breath. I remained capable of smiling
at babies. I was even able to look at an attractive young woman and
feel a response more immediate than nostalgia.
But I missed Lorraine terribly, and we had never had children,
neither of us had any close living relations or much in the way of
friends; I was unemployed and unemployable, confined
forever-more within the contracting walls of my pension and our
modest savingsтАж all the joy and much of the simple structure of
my life had been leeched away, and the future looked like more of
the same, a protracted fumble toward the grave.
If anything postponed the act of suicide it wasnтАЩt courage or
principle but the daily trivia. I would kill myself (I decided more
than once), but not until after the nightly newsтАж not until I paid
the electric billтАж not until I had taken my walk.
Not until I solved the mystery IтАЩd brought home from
Finders.
I wonтАЩt describe the books in detail. They looked more or less
like others of their kind. What was strange about them was that I
didnтАЩt recognize them, although this was a genre (paperback science
fiction of the 1950s and тАШ60s) I had once known in intimate detail.
The shock was not just unfamiliarity, since I might have
missed any number of minor works by minor writers; but these
were major novels by well-known names, not retitled works or
variant editions. A single example: I sat down that night with a
book called The Stone Pillow, by a writer whose identity any science