"George Alec Effinger - Relatives" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

RELATIVES
by GEORGE ALEC EFFINGER (1973)


[VERSION 1.2 (December 19 2005). If you find and correct errors in the text, please update the
version number by 0.1 and redistribute.]




For Victoria Schochet,
the St. Mother Cabrini of the publishing world.
Or maybe the Ma Barker.



We are all hunting for rational reasons for believing in the absurd.
--LAWRENCE DURRELL
Justine

We are digging our own graves.
--JOHN A. STORMER
None Dare Call It Treason



-=*=-



CHAPTER 1

The radio said that the quality of the air had been judged acceptable for the first time in two years.
Ernest Weinraub couldn't see any difference, through his modular apartment's single window the skies
over Brooklyn still looked yellow, a sick color that tempted him to get back into bed. But, as every
morning, he prodded himself with thoughts of job and money. He closed the steel shutters so the light
wouldn't disturb Gretchen in her sleep. Then he went into the tiny, curtained bathroom area to shave.
Ernest wondered if the air outside would smell better than usual. He could almost recall the
summertime fragrances of his childhood. Lord, there were probably plenty of kids on the streets now
who had never gotten that first fresh smell. They were probably down there this morning, bouncing
spaldeens against the building, trying to figure out why the air was so funny. Life in the city had changed
rapidly; not many trees grew leaves these days, just a few in Prospect Park. That didn't make Ernest feel
sad. It made him feel old.
It was dark in the small apartment with the louvers shut. Ernest dressed quickly; he always felt lonely
in the morning, with his wife asleep across the room. He tended to think cheerless thoughts, unpleasant
things, and he often had to shake his head to break the melancholy train. On television he heard the
popular sociologists talking about the reasons. Too many people living too closely together. A person
needed a certain territory that he felt he could master. The regulated apartment modules seemed more
and more like tin boxes, the kind they packed dead fish in....
Ernest pulled the hinged bench down from its place on the wall and swung open one of the seats. He