"Фредерик Браун. Night of the Jabberwock (англ) " - читать интересную книгу автора

o'clock half past at the latest. And thanks for the drink."
He went out and, through Smiley's window, I could see him getting into
his shiny convertible. He blew the Klaxon and waved back at me as he pulled
out from the curb.
I looked at myself in the mirror back of Smiley's bar and wondered how
old Al Grainger thought I was. "Hope I can do the same thing when I'm your
age," indeed. Sounded as though he thought I was eighty, at least. I'll be
fifty-three my next birthday.
But I had to admit that I looked that old, and that my hair was turning
white. I watched myself in the mirror and that whiteness scared me just a
little. No, I wasn't old yet, but I was getting that way. And, much as I
crab about it, I like living. I don't want to get old and I don't want to
die. Especially as I can't look forward, as a good many of my fellow
townsmen do, to an eternity of harp playing and picking bird-lice out of my
wings. Nor, for that matter, an eternity of shoveling coal, although that
would probably be the more likely of the two in my case.
Smiley came back. He jerked his finger at the door. "I don't like that
guy, Doc," he said.
"Al? He's all right. A little wet behind the ears, maybe. You're just
prejudiced because you don't know where his money comes from. Maybe he's got
a printing press and makes it himself. Come to think of it, I've got a
printing press. Maybe I should try that myself."
"Hell, it ain't that, Doc. It's not my business how a guy earns his
money or where he gets it if he don't earn it. It's the way he talks. You
talk crazy, too, but well, you do it in a nice way. When he says something
to me I don't understand he says it in a way that makes me feel like a
stupid bastard. Maybe I am one, but"
I felt suddenly ashamed of all the things I'd ever said to Smiley that
I knew he wouldn't understand.
I said, "It's not a matter of intelligence, Smiley. It's merely a
matter of literary background. Have one drink with me, and then I'd better
go."
I poured him a drink and this time a small one for myself. I was
beginning to feel the effects, and I didn't want to get too drunk to give Al
Grainger a good game of chess if he dropped in.
I said, for no reason at all, "You're a good guy, Smiley," and he
laughed and said, "So are you, Doc. Literary background or not, you're a
little crazy, but you're a good guy."
And then, because we were both embarrassed at having caught ourselves
saying things like that, I found myself staring past Smiley at the calendar
over the bar. It had the usual kind of picture one sees on barroom calendars
an almost too voluptuous naked woman and it was imprinted by Beal Brothers
Store.
It was just a bit of bother to keep my eyes focused on it, I noticed,
although I hadn't had enough to drink to affect my mind at all. Right then,
for instance, I was thinking of two things at one and the same time. Part of
my brain, to my disgust, persisted in wondering if I could get Beal Brothers
to start running a quarter page ad instead of an eighth page; I tried to
squelch the thought by telling myself that I didn't care, tonight, whether
anybody advertised in the Clarion at all, and that part of my brain went on