"Thomas A. Easton - Down on the Truck Farm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

floor around him, at one last blossom crushed in a sticky hand.

Jimmy wished his older sister were still at home. She would be more sympathetic. But she had gone off
to college two years before, and....

“Hey, Ma!”

It was not their mother who came to the door, one hand holding a glass of water, the other a pair of
yellow pills. It was Dad, tall, thin to the point of gauntness, balding, his face lugubriously sad, his head
shaking, his voice tsking, “Sober up, boy. You're supposed to be helping us get the carpet up. Not....”
With the hand that held the pills he gestured toward the house next door. “You want to wind up like
Petra? She lost her son, not just a friend.”

Jimmy made a face. Outlaw gengineers had turned the honeysuckle loose upon the world, and no one
had been able to get rid of it since. But the biochemists, as ingenious in their way as the gengineers, had
promptly devised an antidote for the euphoric in the nectar. The yellow pills contained a mixture of that
antidote and the much older alcohol detoxicant. In mere moments, his system was free of both drugs and
he was staring longingly once more at the pumpkin across the way. A best friend was notjust a friend.

“C'mon, Jimmy.” He shook Caleb's hand off his arm, levered himself out of his low seat, and followed his
father into the living room. For a little while then, he helped move the couch, easy chairs, end tables,
books and bookcase, into other rooms. Then he pried nails from the floorboards, rolled the old, worn
carpet into a wormlike cylinder, sneezed at the dust he stirred, and marveled at the circular marks upon
the wood beneath.

His mother blew her nose and ran her fingers across the marks. “Water stains,” she said. She was Dad's
total opposite, short, round, her hair thick and blonde. Caleb's hair was like hers. Jimmy's was thinner,
drabber, like his father's. “And ground-in dirt. And just a hair of indentation. Someone had flower pots in
here once. Heavy ones.”

Jimmy wondered if that someone had been Tommy's father. But that thought evaporated as the carpet
company's delivery van, a Bioblimp, arrived, lifted off the house's roof with its muscular tentacles, and
replaced the roll of old carpet with one of new. He stepped onto the deck once more to watch the van
drift down the breeze, not yet using the propellor mounted on the rear of its crew pod. Its main ancestor
had been some simple jellyfish. The gengineers had vastly enlarged it, swelled it up with hydrogen, given
its tentacles muscles that belonged more properly to an octopus or squid, and equipped it with cargo
pockets whose genes had come from kangaroos. Behind him, he could hear his mother running the
vacuum cleaner across the bare floor, removing all the grit and dust that had sifted through and
accumulated beneath the old carpet.

****

When the new carpet was in place and the furniture was restored to its positions, the whole family took
their seats-Jimmy's mother and Caleb on the couch, Dad in his recliner, Jimmy in the antique wing
chair-and admired the carpet. That was when Dad sighed and said, “Jim. We have got to do something
about you.”

Jimmy shifted uncomfortably. Caleb snickered until his mother pinched his thigh.

“You've finished school,” Dad went on. “At least until you decide to go on. But you don't seem to want a