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

there at the bottom of my back steps, looking up at the black velvet sky,
star-studded but moonless, and wondering what was behind it and why madmen
were mad. And how strange it would be if one of them was right and all the
rest of us were crazy instead.
Then I went back inside and I was cowardly enough to do a ridiculous
thing. From the kitchen I went into my bedroom and to my closet. In a
shoebox on the top shelf was a short-barreled thirty-eight caliber revolver,
one of the compact, lightweight models they call a Banker's Special. I'd
never shot at anything with it and hoped that I never would and I wasn't
sure I could hit anything smaller than an elephant or farther away than a
couple of yards. I don't even like guns. I hadn't bought this one; an
acquaintance had once borrowed twenty bucks from me and had insisted on my
taking the pistol for security. And later he'd wanted another five and said
if I gave it to him I could keep the gun. I hadn't wanted it, but he'd
needed the five pretty badly and I'd given it to him.
It was still loaded with bullets that were in it when we'd made the
deal four or five years ago, and I didn't know whether they'd still shoot or
not, but I put it in my trouser pocket. I wouldn't use it, of course, except
in dire extremity and I'd miss anything I shot at even then, but I thought
that just carrying the gun would make my coming conversation seem dangerous
and exciting, more than it would be otherwise.
I went into the living room and he was still there. He hadn't poured
himself a drink, so I poured one for each of us and then sat down on the
sofa again.
I lifted my drink and over the rim of it watched him do that marvelous
trick again just a toss of the glass toward his lips. I drank my own less
spectacularly and said, "I wish I had a movie camera. I'd like to film the
way you do that and then study it in slow motion."
He laughed. "Afraid it's my one way of showing off. I used to be a
juggler once."
"And now? If you don't mind asking."
"A student," he said. "A student of Lewis Carroll and mathematics."
"Is there a living in it?" I asked him.
He hesitated just a second. "Do you mind if I defer answering that
until you've learned what you'll learn at tonight's meeting?"
Of course there wasn't going to be any meeting tonight; I knew that
now. But I said, "Not at all. But I hope you don't mean that we can't talk
about Carroll, in general, until after the meting."
I hoped he'd give the right answer to that; it would mean that I could
get him going on the subject of his mania.
He said, "Of course not. In fact, I want to talk about him. There are
facts I want to give you that will enable you to understand things better.
Some of the facts yon already know, but I'll refresh you on them anyway. For
instance, dates. You had his birth and death dates correct, or nearly enough
so. But do you know the dates of the Alice books or any other of his works?
The sequence is important."
"Not exactly," I told him. "I think that he wrote the first Alice book
when he was comparatively young, about thirty."
"Close. He was thirty-two. Alice in Wonderland was published in
eighteen sixty-three, but even before then he was on the trail of something.