"Fritz Leiber - Damnation Morning" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

DAMNATION MORNING

Fritz Leiber




Time travelling, which, is not quite the good clean boyish fun it’s cracked up to be, started for me when
this woman with the sign on her forehead looked in on me from the open doorway of the hotel bedroom
where I’d hidden myself and the bottles and asked me, “Look, Buster, do you want to live?”

It was the sort of question mat would have suited a re-

ligious crackpot of the strong-arm, save-your-soul variety,

but she didn’t look like one. And I might very well have

answered it—in fact I almost did—with a hangover, one

percent humorous, “Good God, no!” Or—a poor second

—I could have studied the dark, dust-burnished arabesques

of the faded blue carpet for a perversely long time and

then countered with a grudging, “Oh, if you insist”

But I didn’t, perhaps because there didn’t seem to b® anything like one percent of humour in the
situation. Point One: I have been blacked out the past half hour or so—this woman might just have
opened the door or she might have been watching me for ten minutes. Point Two: I was in the fringes of
DTs, trying to come off a big drunk. Point Three: I knew for certain that I had just killed someone or left
him or her to die, though I hadn’t the faintest idea of whom or why.

Let me try to picture my state of mind a little more

vividly. My consciousness, the sentient self-aware part of

me, was a single quivering point in the centre of an end-

less plane vibrating harshly with misery and menace. I
was like a man in a rowboat in the middle of the Pacific

or better, I was like a man in a shell hole in the North African desert (I served underMontgomeryand
any re-gion adjoining the DTs is certainly a No Man’s Land). Around me, in every direction—‘this is my
consciousness Fm describing, remember—miles of flat burning sand, nothing more. Way beyond the
horizon were two divorced wives, some estranged children, assorted jobs, and other unexceptional
wreckage. Much Closer, but still beyond the horizon, w»eStateHospital(twice) and Psycho (four times).
Shallowly buried very near at hand, or perhaps blackening in the open just behind me in the shell hole,
was the person I had killed.