"The Wells Of Hell" - читать интересную книгу автора (Masterton Graham)

'What's silly? This is coloured water, possibly contaminated. Fd like you to test it for me.'
He picked up the jar and peered at it with bulging, shortsighted eyes. 'Where'd you get this?' he asked.
'Out at Jimmy Bodine's house. He says he's had discoloured water for Two to three days. Alison Bodine swears it smells of fish, and Shelley seems to think the same way.'
'Shelley? Your cat Shelley?'
'That's right. When I took the lid off the jar he went crazy. When I put it back on again, he returned to his normal condition of utter indolence.'
Dan switched off the bright light over his microscope and rubbed his eyes. 'Do you think Shelley would like a job here?' he asked. 'I have a vacancy for a lab assistant with a good nose.'
'I'm serious, Dan. All I'm asking is that you test it.'
Dan Kirk smiled tiredly, and nodded. 'You know that I have to anyway. If you like, we'll run through it now. I think I've had a bellyful of swine fever for one day.'
'Is it bad?'
'About as bad as it can get. Poor old Ken Follard had to slaughter every .damn pig on the farm. You can smell burning bacon as far away as Roxbury.'
I took out my handkerchief and blew my nose. It was the effect of walking into an overheated laboratory from a freezing street. I looked at Rheta over the handkerchief as Dan led the way to the
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centrifuge, and winked. I guess it wasn't very romantic, but I believe in taking every chance you can get.
'You want to tell me something about this sample?' asked Dan, switching on the lights around the grey-painted centrifuge. 'Which faucet it came from? Any other details?'
'Poured straight from the kitchen faucet. Jimmy says it's the same out of every faucet in the house.'
Dan took the lid off the jar and sniffed. He paused, considered what he had smelled, and then sniffed again.
'Maybe Shelley was right,' he told me.
'You think you smell fish?'
'That's one way of describing it.'
'What's another way? Turtle soup?'
Dan dipped his finger in the water and licked it. He frowned, and then licked again. 'There's definitely some kind of unusual taste and smell associated with this water. But it's pretty hard to define. It doesn't taste like any of the usual salts or minerals we get around here. It's not like manganese or potassium.'
He tore off a piece of litmus paper and dipped it into the water. As the water soaked into it, the paper gradually turned from pale purple to a reddish colour.
'Well,' said Dan, 'that indicates the presence of acids.'
'What kind of acids?'
'I don't know. We're going to have to make all the proper tests. We're going to start by putting a sample into the centrifuge, and seeing if we can separate any solids out of it. Did you see if it left any deposits on the Bodine's kitchen sink, or maybe their tub?'
'Not a trace. Mind you, it's only been troubling them for a couple of days, and that's hardly long enough to leave a stain.'
Dan switched on the centrifuge and we waited while it whirled the Bodines' water around and around. Dan said: 'Did you see the Hartford game Thursday?'
'I missed it. Mrs Huntley had a burst pipe.'
Dan wearily rubbed the back of his neck. 'I missed it, too. I was up half the damn night analysing fertiliser.'
Rheta came across the laboratory with an armful of files and reports. Close to, she was very pretty, in an odd kind of way. Her nose was a little too short, and her lips were a little too wide, but
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what she lacked in symmetry she made up for with an infectious smile. 'I like men who put their work first,' she said, in a mock-serious voice, as if she was presenting us each with a medal. 'It shows a responsible, moral character.'
'That's me,' I told her. 'Pipes before pleasure.'
Dan finished his centrifuge test, and then he took the water over to the spectroscope. He was a slow, meticulous worker, and I knew that it was going to be three or four hours before he'd completed his analysis. As the electric clock on the laboratory wall crept past seven, my initial enthusiasm began to pall, and I began to feel bored and hungry, and very much in need of a beer. It was so dark outside now that I could see my weary reflection, sitting on a laboratory stool with my chin in my hand. Rheta had almost finished tidying up the rows of test tubes and pipettes and assorted laboratory junk, and I guessed she was getting ready to quit for the day.
'Is this really a job for a girl like you?' I asked her, as she put away her Bunsen burner hose. 'Why didn't you take up something interesting, like go-go dancing? Or you could have been a Playboy bunny with your looks.'
'Believe me,' said Rheta, closing the cupboard door, 'analysing swine fever samples is a hell of a lot more interesting than serving cocktails to lecherous people like you.'
'Who's lecherous? Just because I have this mental picture of you in one of those tight satin outfits, with a cotton puff on your backside, that doesn't mean anything. Anyway, how about dinner tonight?1
'How about dinner tonight?' she asked, unbuttoning her lab coat.
'I shrugged. 'We could do anything you like. We could go up to Gaylordsville and have bluefish and white wine at the Fritz & Fox. Or we could go to Conn's Dairy Bar and have milk shakes and hamburgers.'
'You really know how to live, don't you?' she asked me, with good-humoured sarcasm. 'Well, thanks, but no thanks. I have a date with Kenny Packer at nine.'
'Kenny Packer the football player? Pigskin Packer?'
'That's him.'
'He's like the Incredible Hulk, only pink.'
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- Dan said: 'Hold on a minute, you two,' and without taking his eyes away from his microscope, he beckoned us over. 'Come and take a look at this.'
We came over, and Dan shifted his stool back so that we could take a look into the binocular lenses. I took a squint first, and all I could see was blurry shapes swimming around in a sea of dazzling light. But then Rheta took her turn, and she spent two or three minutes frowning at the slide in silence, occasionally adjusting the focus or moving the slide from side to side.
Eventually, she stood straight, and looked at Dan with a questioning, concerned expression. Dan looked back at her, and shook his head like he didn't know what to say, or what to do.
I said, impatiently: 'Do you mind letting me in on this? All I saw were curly little squiggles.'
Dan nodded. 'There are always curly little squiggles, even in the clearest water. Micro-organisms which filtration and purification never remove. They're quite harmless, on the whole. You drink millions of them every day.'
'What are you trying to do?' I asked him. 'Put me off dinner?'