"Robert F. Young - On the River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

"I've been on it almost two days," Farrell said.
"I must have been the first to comтАФthe first to cast myself adrift then." She wrung out her stockings
and spread them on the raft to dry. She placed her bedraggled slippers beside them. She stared at the
articles for some time. "Funny the way we do such things at a time like this," she said. "Why should it
make any difference to me now whether my shoes and stockings are wet or dry?"
"I guess we're creatures of habit," he said. "Right up to the very end. Last evening, at the inn where I
stayed the night, I shaved. True, there was an electric razor available; but why did I go to the trouble?"
She smiled wryly. "Last evening, at the inn where I stayed the night, I took a bath. I was going to put
up my hair, but I caught myself just in time. It looks it, doesn't it?"
It did, but he didn't say so. Nor did he gallantly deny the fact. Somehow, small talk seemed out of
place. The raft was drifting past a small island now. There were many such islands in the RiverтАФbleak
little expanses of sand and gravel for the most part, although all of them had at least one tree. He glanced
at the girl. Was she seeing the island, too? Her eyes told him that she was.
Still he was not convinced. It was hard to believe that two peopleтАФtwo people who did not even
know each other, in factтАФcould have transformed the process of dying into an allegorical illusion so
strong that it was indistinguishable from ordinary reality. And it was harder yet to believe that those same
two people could have entered into that illusion and have met each other for the first time.
It was all so strange. He felt real. He breathed, he saw; he experienced pleasure and pain. And yet all
the while he breathed and saw and experienced, he knew that he wasn't actually on the River. He
couldn't be on the River, for the simple reason that in another phase of realityтАФthe real phaseтАФhe was
sitting in his car, in his garage, with the motor running and the garage doors closed.
And yet somehow, in a way that he could not fathom, he was on the River; drifting down the River
on a strange raft that he had never built or bought and had never even known existed until he had found
himself sitting on it nearly two days ago. Or was it two hours ago? Or two minutes? Or two seconds?
He did not know. All he knew was that, subjectively at least, almost forty-eight hours had passed
since he had first found himself on the River. Half of those hours he had spent on the River itself, and the
other half he had spent in two deserted inns, one of which he had found on the River bank at the close of
the first afternoon and the other of which he had found on the River bank at the close of the second.
That was another strange thing about the River. It was impossible to travel on it at night. Not because
of the darkness (although the darkness did impose a hazard), but be cause of an insurmountable
reluctance on his own partтАФa reluctance compounded of dread and of an irresistible desire to interrupt
his ineluctable journey long enough to rest. Long enough to find peace. But why peace? he wondered.
Wasn't it peace toward which the River was bearing him? Wasn't the only real peace the peace of
oblivion? Surely by this time he should have accepted a truism as basic as that.
"It's beginning to get dark," Jill said. "There should be an inn soon." Her shoes and stockings had
dried, and she put them back on.
"We'll watch for it. You keep an eye on the right bank, and I'll keep an eye on the left."
The inn was on the right bank, built almost flush with the water's edge. A low pier protruded a dozen
feet into the stream, and after securing the raft to it with the mooring line, Farrell stepped onto the heavy
planking and helped Jill up beside him. So far as he could see, the innтАФon the outside, at leastтАФwas not
particularly different from the two he had already stayed overnight in. It was three-storied and square,
and its tiers of windows made warm golden rectangles in the gathering dusk. The interior proved to be
virtually identical too, give or take a few modificationsтАФJill's work, no doubt, since she must have
collaborated on the creation. There was a small lobby, a bar, and a large dining room; a gleaming maple
staircase curved upward to the second and third floors, and electric lights burned everywhere in the guise
of counterfeit candles and imitation hurricane-lamps.
Farrell glanced around the dining room. "It looks as though you and I are slaves to American
Colonial tradition," he said.
Jill laughed. "We do seem to have a lot in common, don't we?"
 He pointed to a glittering juke box in the far corner of the room. "One of us, though, was a little