"Joe Haldeman - Guardian" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

horrific, if less literary, tales, for a penny a word, I would have scoffed.
For all that day and the next, I worked my way through the Flammarion book,
making a list of words and phrases I couldn't puzzle out, along with their page numbers.
Greta and Valerie were glad to sit with me and try to translate—Greta especially, because
the book aroused in her the same fascination it did in me.
Many years later, I regretted not being able to talk with them frankly about their
lives in California. Today I could; it's hard to shock an old woman. They were apparently
lighthearted and casual about it, and I might have learned things from them that would
have made that aspect of marriage easier. My main concern at the time, though (other
than the Flammarion book), was keeping Daniel away from them. He was a pretty lad,
and had what I now admit were normal impulses for a fourteen-year-old. To me at the
time, he was still a vulnerable child, and I his only protector—and the pain his father had
caused both of us did nothing to liberalize my attitude toward carnality.
New worlds.

After I returned the book to them, I wrote down this: Flammarion makes it seem not just
likely, but inevitable, that other worlds should be inhabitable. To deny that is almost
impious, saying that God's powers of creation are finite. The people on those worlds must
be wondrous indeed, evolving to adapt to their harsh and bizarre conditions. (Darwin's
Origin of Species was published the year after I was born, and when I was in college it
was part of the canon, though still fodder for righteously indignant sermons.)
When we passed by Hannibal, the pilot entertained us after dinner with an hour's
reading from Twain's book. He was a natural comedian, and did the voices of the
querulous and gruff in a way that had us helpless with laughter.
The next day, though, we had cause to wonder why they call this river the
Mississippi rather than the Missouri. We reached the confluence of the two, and it was
obvious that the rich muddy waters of the Missouri quite overwhelmed the northern
"branch." For many miles the two ran in parallel courses, until the clear Mississippi
finally blended with its turbid sister.
Then we came to the end of the line for Diamond Jo Steamers, St. Louis. It was
strange to be on land again after so many days. Both of us found that if we tried to stand
still, the ground would continue to rock under our feet, a disturbing sensation that lasted
at least a whole day.
We took a room at the Planter's Hotel, and Daniel tagged along while I went off to
shop for another working dress. I was able to leave him in a bookstore while I was being
fitted.
I'd found out that the Missouri Pacific Railroad had put on an early-morning train,
without sleepers, to Kansas City, so we came down to the station at six thirty the next
morning. There were a hundred or so people slumped around the waiting room, not all of
us in sympathy with the Pullman strikers.
The trip to Kansas City was uneventful. We backtracked a bit, going along the
Missouri River all morning, and then went off into the featureless plains after Jefferson
City. The porter gave us a deck of cards, and Daniel, with undisguised avidity, taught me
how to play poker, which he had picked up on the steamboat while I was immersed in
Flammarion. We played for toothpicks, and after a couple of hours he had almost all of
them—and then I mastered the idea of bluffing, and won almost all of them back. What
kind of mother would lie to her son over a couple of toothpicks?
It did pass the time, but we were both tired and sore by the time we got to Kansas
City at sundown. We could have continued down into Kansas (K.C. is in Missouri) but
decided to rest up. We got a shabby but clean room at the Centropolis.