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

been getting glasses for us. "I hope he'll be all right, Mrs. Carr. But if
you want to skip coming here for a while"
"Oh, no, I can still come. He'll be home only a few days, and it was
just that today they brought him home at two o'clock, just when I was
getting ready to come here and That's plenty, thanks."
We touched glasses and I downed mine while she drank about half of
hers. She said, "Oh, there was a phone call for you, about an hour ago. A
little while after I got here."
"Find out who it was?"
"He wouldn't tell me, just said it wasn't important."
I shook my head sadly. "That, Mrs. Carr, is one of the major fallacies
of the human mind. The idea, I mean, that things can be arbitrarily divided
into the important and the unimportant. How can anyone decide whether a
given fact is important or not unless one knows everything about it; and no
one knows everything about anything."
She smiled, but a bit vaguely, and I decided to bring it down to earth.
I said, "What would you say is important, Mrs. Carr?"
She put her head on one side and considered it seriously. "Well, work
is important, isn't it?"
"It is not," I told her. "I'm afraid you score zero. Work is only a
means to an end. We work in order to enable ourselves to do the important
things, which are the things we want to do. Doing what we want to do that's
what's important, if anything is."
"That sounds like a funny way of putting it, but maybe you're right.
Well, anyway, this man who called said he'd either call again or come
around. I told him you probably wouldn't be home until eight or nine
o'clock."
She finished her drink and declined an encore. I walked to the front
door with her, saying that I'd have been glad to drive her home but that my
car had two flat tires. I'd discovered them that morning when I'd started to
drive to work. One I might have stopped to fix, but two discouraged me; I
decided to leave the car in the garage until Saturday afternoon, when I'd
have lots of time. And then, too, I know that I should get the exercise of
walking to and from work every day, but as long as my car is in running
condition, I don't. For Mrs. Carr's sake, though, I wished now that I'd
fixed the tires.
She said, "It's only a few blocks, Mr. Stoeger. I wouldn't think of
letting you, even if your car was working. Good night."
"Oh, just a minute, Mrs. Carr. What department at Bonney's does your
husband work in?"
"The Roman candle department."
It made me forget, for the moment, what I'd been leading up to. I said,
"The Roman candle department! That's a wonderful phrase; I love it. If I
sell the paper, darned if I don't look up Bonney the very next day. I'd love
to work in the Roman candle department. Your husband is a lucky man."
"You're joking, Mr. Stoeger. But are you really thinking of selling the
paper?"
"Well thinking of it." And that reminded me. "I didn't get any story
on the accident at Bonney's, didn't even hear about it. And I'm badly in
need of a story for the front page. Do you know the details of what