"George Alec Effinger - The Nick of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Effinger George Alec)

“I can't wait to see it,” said Mihalik.
“Yeah, but there's this huge line all the time,” she said. “You got to be ready to wait. I hate lines, don't
you? You'd be better off seeing something else.”
 “What would you suggest?”
The young woman thought for a moment. “Have you seen the Monkey Mountain in Frank Buck's
Jungleland?”
“No,” said Mihalik, “I just got here.”
“I love to watch monkeys,” said the woman. “Well, enjoy yourself.” She waved goodbye.
“Thank you,” he said. He decided to see Democracity another time. He wanted to look at the other
buildings, the exhibitions, and the beautiful, quaint Art Deco architecture of this harmless island in the
past. The buildings themselves reminded him of something: their graceful curved lines where, in 1996,
they would instead have had sharp forbidding edges; their naive pride in proclaiming which company or
nation had erected them; their clean accents in glass, brick, and stainless steel. After a moment he knew
what they made him think of -- it was the colors, the pastel pinks and pale greens. They were the same
colors as the little candy hearts he used to see on Valentine's Day, the ones with the clever little slogans.
Oh Baby and Kiss Me and You Doll and 2 Much. The candy colors contributed to the feeling of
childlike innocence Mihalik felt. It made no difference that the buildings celebrated the very things that
turned this wonderful world into the anxiety-ridden bankrupt ruin of 1996.
He walked toward the Lagoon of Nations. It was heartwarming to see families enjoying their outing
together. That sort of thing was rare in Mihalik's time. Here in 1939, mothers and fathers still protected
their children from the evils of the world, instead of just throwing up their hands in futile despair. Here
there were parents who wanted the best for the young ones, who still thought it was valuable to show the
children new things, educational things, sights and sounds and experiences that let the boys and girls grow
up feeling that they participated in an exciting, vibrant world. Mihalik wished that his parents had been
more like that. He wondered, then, where his parents were; in 1939, he realized, his mother had not even
been born. His father was a boy of two, running around in a darling little sailor suit somewhere in Elkhart,
Indiana. Mihalik was sorry that he had only a few hours to spend in the past; he would have been curious
to visit his grandparents. That was only one of the interesting things he could do in 1939.

Adventures in Yesterdayland
Mihalik looked at his watch; it was eleven o'clock. He sat on a bench along Constitution Mall, under
the cold stone eyes of the giant statue of George Washington. There was a newspaper on the bench.
Mihalik paged through the paper happily, laughing aloud at the simple views people had of the world in
this day. He expected to be astounded by the prices in the advertisements, and he was: linen suits went
for $8.25 or two for $16, a beef roast was $0.17 a pound. They didn't have linen suits or beef roasts in
1996. But Mihalik had been prepared for this. He had been briefed, he had been carefully indoctrinated
by technicians and specialists so that whatever era he ended up in, he wouldn't be stunned into inactivity
by such things as the price of a beef roast. So Mihalik was not paralyzed by temporal shock. He found
that he could still turn the pages of the newspaper. On the sports page he read that both the Dodgers and
the Giants had lost, but that the Yankees had crushed the Browns 14-1 on Bill Dickey's three home runs.
He didn't have any idea what any of that meant.
“Hello,” said a man in a tan suit. He looked like he never got any sun; Mihalik thought the man's face
was the unhealthy color of white chocolate Easter bunnies. The man took a seat on the bench.
“Hello,” said Mihalik.
“I'm from out of town. I'm from South Bend, Indiana.” Mihalik recalled that Indiana had been one of
the fifty-two “states” that had once composed the United States. “You're probably wondering why I'm
not over at the Court of Sport,” said the resident of 1939.
“Yes,” said Mihalik, “that's just what I was thinking.”
“Because they're raising the blue and gold standard of the University of Notre Dame over there, right
this minute. But I said to myself, ‘Roman,’ I said, ‘why travel all this way by train and come to this