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

far off then.

At work, he found the needle not quite so near the peg as it had been. Three business cards slipped into
the opening easily. Four would just clear.

Up on the roof, a little knot of his coworkers were marveling at the vastness of the tossing green waters
that stretched to the horizon in every direction. The secretary with the gold pince-nez gripped his arm. "I
come up here every morning. We'll never be able to see anything like this again, and today will be the last
day we're this high up."

He nodded, trying to look serious and pleased. The secretary with the gold pince-nez was the CEO's,
and although he had seen her often he had never spoken to her--much less been spoken to.

An executive vice president laid large soft hands on his shoulders. "Take a good long look, young man. If
it sticks with you, you'll think big. We always need people who think big."

He said, "I will, sir."

Yet he found himself looking at the people who looked, and not at the boundless ocean. There was the
freckled kid from the mailroom who whistled, and over there the pretty blonde who never smiled.

All alone at the very edge of the gently slanting roof, was old Parsons. Hadn't Parsons retired? Clearly
Parsons had not; and Parsons had set up a tarnished brass telescope on a tripod--a telescope through
which he peered down into the watery abyss that had opened before the city, not out at the grandeur of
the horizon.

"Something in the water?"

Parsons straightened up. "Sure is."

"What is it?"

Gnarled fingers stroked bristling, almost invisible white whiskers. "That," Parsons said slowly, "is what I'm
trying to figure, young feller."

"A whale?" he asked.

Parsons shook his head. "Nope. "'Tain't that. You might think it'd be easy to figure, with a good glass.
But 'tain't." Parsons stepped aside. "You want to look?"

He bent as Parsons had and made a slight adjustment to the focus.

It was a city, or a town at least, nestled now in the trough. Narrow streets, roofs that seemed to be
largely of red tiles. A white spire rose above its houses and shops, and for an instant--only an instant, it
seemed to him that he had caught the gleam of the gold cross atop the spire.

He straightened up, swallowed as though his throat and stomach had some part in absorbing what he had
just seen, and bent to look again.

Something white fluttered and vanished above one red roof. A pigeon, he felt certain. There were