"Judith Merril - Dead Center" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merril Judith)

DEAD CENTER
THEY GAVE him sweet ices, and kissed him all round, and the Important People who had come to
dinner all smiled in a special way as his mother took him from the living room and led him down the hall
to his own bedroom.
"Great kid you got there," they said to Jock, his father, and "Serious little bugger, isn't he?" Jock
didn't say anything, but Toby knew he would be grinning, looking pleased and embarrassed. Then their
voices changed, and that meant they had begun to talk about the important events for which the important
people had come.
In his own room, Toby wriggled his toes between crisp sheets, and breathed in the
powder-and-perfume smell of his mother as she bent over him for a last hurried goodnight kiss. There
was no use asking for a story tonight. Toby lay still and waited while she closed the door behind her and
went off to the party, click-tap, tip-clack, hurrying on her high silver heels. She had heard the voices
change back there too, and she didn't want to miss anything. Toby got up and opened his door just a
crack, and set himself down in back of it, and listened.
In the big square living room, against the abstract patterns of gray and vermilion and chartreuse, the
men and women moved in easy patterns of familiar acts. Coffee, brandy, cigarette, cigar. Find your
partner, choose your seat. Jock sprawled with perfect relaxed contentment on the low couch with the
deep red corduroy cover. Tim O'Heyer balanced nervously on the edge of the same couch, wreathed in
cigar-smoke, small and dark and alert. Gordon Kimberly dwarfed the big easy chair with the bulking
importance of him. Ben Stein, shaggy and rumpled as ever, was running a hand through his hair till it too
stood on end. He was leaning against a window frame, one hand on the back of the straight chair in
which his wife Sue sat, erect and neat and proper and chic, dressed in smart black that set off perfectly
her precise blonde beauty. Mrs. Kimberly, just enough overstuffed so that her pearls gave the
appearance of actually choking her, was the only stranger to the house. She was standing near the
doorway, politely admiring Toby's personal art gallery, as Allie Madero valiantly strove to explain each
minor masterpiece.
Ruth Kruger stood still a moment, surveying her room and her guests. Eight of them, herself included,
and all Very Important People. In the familiar comfort of her own living room, the idea made her giggle.
Allie and Mrs. Kimberly both turned to her, questioning. She laughed and shrugged, helpless to explain,
and they all went across the room to join the others.

"Guts," O'Heyer said through the cloud of smoke. "How do you do it, Jock? Walk out of a setup like
this into . . . God knows what?"
"Luck," Jock corrected him. "A setup like this helps. I'm the world's pampered darling and I know
it."
"Faith is what he means," Ben put in. "He just gets by believing that last year's luck is going to hold
up. So it does."
"Depends on what you mean by luck. If you think of it as a vector sum composed of predictive
powers and personal ability and accurate information and . . ."
"Charm and nerve and . . ."
"Guts," Tim said again, interrupting the interrupter. "All right, all of them," Ben agreed. "Luck is as
good a word as any to cover the combination."
"We're all lucky people." That was Allie, drifting into range, with Ruth behind him. "We just
happened to get born at the right time with the right dream. Any one of us, fifty years ago, would have
been called a wild-eyed visiona—"
"Any one of us," Kimberly said heavily, "fifty ago, would have had a different dream—in time with the
times."
Jock smiled, and let them talk, not joining in much. He listened to philosophy and compliments and
speculations and comments, and lay sprawled across the comfortable couch in his own living room, with
his wife's hand under his own, consciously letting his mind play back and forth between the two lives he