"Clifford D.Simak. All the traps of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора

Title: All the traps of Earth
Author: Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: 1960
Genre: science fiction
Comments: To my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this story.
Source: scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge
Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000.
Date of e-text: August 12, 1999
Prepared by: Anada Sucka

Anticopyright 1999. All rights reversed.

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ALL THE TRAPS OF EARTH

Clifford D. Simak



THE INVENTORY list was long. On its many pages, in his small and precise
script, he had listed furniture, paintings, china, silverware and all the
rest of it - all the personal belongings that had been accumulated by the
Barringtons through a long family history.

And now that he had reached the end of it, he noted down himself, the
last item of them all:

One domestic robot, Richard Daniel, antiquated but in good repair.

He laid the pen aside and shuffled all the inventory sheets together and
stacked them in good order, putting a paper weight upon them - the little
exquisitely carved ivory paper weight that aunt Hortense had picked up that
last visit she had made to Peking.

And having done that, his job came to an end.

He shoved back the chair and rose from the desk and slowly walked across
the living room, with all its clutter of possessions from the family's past.
There, above the mantel, hung the sword that ancient Jonathon had worn in
the War Between the States, and below it, on the mantelpiece itself, the cup
the Commodore had won with his valiant yacht, and the jar of moon-dust that
Tony had brought back from Man's fifth landing on the Moon, and the old
chronometer that had come from the long-scrapped family spacecraft that had
plied the asteroids.

And all around the room, almost cheek by jowl, hung the family
portraits, with the old dead faces staring out into the world that they had
helped to fashion.