"Gene Wolfe - Comber" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

elevators would no longer operate. Rooms and corridors might (or might not) hold some air for a few
hours--most it down on what were now the lower floors. He might, perhaps, break a window and so
escape; if he lived long enough to rise to street level, the edge of the plate, and air, would be what? Thirty
miles away? Forty?

Back home, Mona would have drowned. If the plate were going to turn over, he decided, it would be
better if it did it while he was at home with her. Better if they died together with their unborn child.

****

Next day the inclinometer was no longer on zero, and the chewed ball he had left on his desk had rolled
to one side; as he wrote letters and called contacts, as he began to sketch the outline of his next project,
he watched the space between the end of the needle and the hair-thin zero line grow.

By Friday the needle was no longer near zero, and there were intervening marks which he did not trouble
to read. Because on Friday, at not-quite eleven o'clock of that bright and still almost-level morning, Edith
Benson called to say that Mona had gone into labor while they chatted across the fence, and that she had
driven Mona to the hospital.

He took some time off. By the time he returned to his desk, the needle was no more than a pencil's width
from the peg. It seemed to him to tremble there, and he was reminded of his conversation with the
proprietor of the little shop in which he had bought the inclinometer. He had asked why the scale went no
further; and the proprietor had grinned, showing beautifully regular teeth that had certainly been false.
"Because you won't be there to look at it if she goes farther than that," the proprietor had told him.

A note taped to his desk informed him that he had neglected to set the brake on his swivel chair. It had
pushed open the door of his office and crashed into Mrs. Patterson's desk. He apologized to her in
person.

At quitting time, the space between the point of the needle and the peg would admit three of his business
cards, but not four.

That evening he and Mona sat up until their son's next feeding, talking about colleges and professions. It
would be up to Adrian to choose, they agreed on that. But would not their own attitudes, the training the
gave him, and their very table-talk, influence Adrian's choices? At ten they kissed, looked in on Adrian,
and kissed again.

"Goodnight, honey," Mona said; and he, knowing that she did not want him to watch, "Goodnight,
darling."

****

As he combed his hair the next morning, he found that his thoughts, which should have been focused on
work, were full of Adrian--and the plate. More and taller buildings would go up when this was over.
More and taller building would be built, that was to say, if there was anyone left alive to plan and build
them. His firm would have a part of that, and would profit by it. Those profits would contribute to his
profit-sharing plan.

He shrugged, rinsed his comb, and put it away. The new and wonderful house that he himself had
designed--with a den and a sewing room, and enough bedrooms for five children--would not be quite so