"Nancy Kress - Stinger" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

seeing.
“Please let me through, I’m a doctor. Let me
through please, I’m a doctor—” A tall woman in
jeans, pushing her way determinedly down the
center aisle from the back of the room. She leapt
onto the stage and bent over Reading.
No. Larson refused to believe it. Malcolm
Reading was only forty-nine, healthy as an ox.
Never smoked, ate right, exercised. How could he
be having a stroke?
Still Larson didn’t move forward. The doctor
looked up from Reading and said briskly to the
people clustered behind her, “Ambulance, please.
Tell nine-one-one you need it for a thrombosis—a
serious stroke. Go now.”
Someone—Larson couldn’t see who—went now.
Anita Reading had stopped screaming and seemed
to be quickly following whatever instructions the
doctor was giving her. The crowd changed subtly
from startled hysteria to the kind of half-guilty
excitement that meant somebody else was the
victim. A few people talked excitedly into cell
phones. Reporters.
“Bill?” Anita Reading called, her voice high with
strain. “Where’s Bill?”
“Here,” Larson said, and finally moved forward.
His body felt thick, clumsy, as if he were moving
through something sticky and clotted. And he was.
Disappointment could be as retarding as mud, slow
you down as much as sewage.
Malcolm Peter Reading would never be president
of the United States. Bill Larson would never stand
in the Rose Garden, advising the president about
the world.



JUNE 3

The small Maryland city of La Plata steamed in
the humid heat, even at night, even though it was
barely June. Over ninety in the day, only marginally
below eighty at night. Rain every afternoon, a
choking hot drizzle that passed in an hour and left
nothing cooler than before.
“Gonna be a wild night,” the nurse said, coming
back into the Emergency Room from the parking
lot. Smoking was forbidden anywhere inside the
community hospital, a one-hundred-bed,
well-staffed facility that was the pride of two