"C M Kornbluth - The Altar At Midnight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

It was maybe midnight when the kid showed at the table again, looking kind of dazed. I was drunker
than I ought to be by midnight, so I said I was going for a walk. He tagged along and we wound up on a
bench at Screwball Square. The soap-boxers were still going strong. As I said, it was a nice night. After
a while, a pot-bellied old auntie who didn't give a damn about the face sat down and tried to talk the kid
into going to see some etchings. The kid didn't get it and I led him over to hear the soap-boxers before
there was trouble.
 One of the orators was a mush-mouthed evangelist. "And oh, my friends," he said, "when I looked
through the porthole of the spaceship and beheld the wonder of the Firmament—"



"You're a stinkin' Yankee liar!" the kid yelled at him. "You say one damn more word about can-shootin'
and I'll ram your spaceship down your lyin' throat! Wheah's your redlines if you're such a hot spacer?"



The crowd didn't know what he was talking about, but "wheah's your redlines" sounded good to them,
so they heckled mushmouth off his box with it.



I got the kid to a bench. The liquor was working in him all of a sudden. He simmered down after a while
and asked: "Doc, should I've given Miz Rorty some money? I asked her afterward and she said she'd
admire to have something to remember me by, so I gave her my lighter. She seem' to be real pleased
with it. But I was wondering if maybe I embarrassed her by asking her right out. Like I tol' you, back in
Covington, Kentucky, we don't have places like that. Or maybe we did and I just didn't know about
them. But what do you think I should've done about Miz Rorty?"



"Just what you did," I told him. "If they want money, they ask you for it first. Where you staying?"



"Y.M.C.A.," he said, almost asleep. "Back in Covington, Kentucky, I was a member of the Y and I
kept up my membership. They have to let me in because I'm a member. Spacers have all kinds of
trouble, Doc. Woman trouble. Hotel trouble. Fam'ly trouble. Religious trouble. I was raised a Southern
Baptist, but wheah's Heaven, anyway? I ask' Doctor Chitwood las' time home before the redlines got so
thick—Doc, you aren't a minister of the Gospel, are you? I hope I di'n' say anything to offend you."



"No offense, son," I said. "No offense."



I walked him to the avenue and waited for a fleet cab. It was almost five minutes. The independent cabs
roll drunks and dent the fenders of fleet cabs if they show up in Skid Row and then the fleet drivers have
to make reports on their own time to the company. It keeps them away. But I got one and dumped the