"Alexei Panshin - Farewell to Yesterdays Tomorrows" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

and not completely sure just how serious Wooley was, and that made him ill-at-ease.

“Isn’t it possible that you are mistaking an itch for a twitch?” he asked. “Then if somebody scratches, you
think he’s crazy. But what if their reason isn’t an excuse, what if there is a genuine cause and you just
can’t see it? If you want a crude example, is a concentration-camp inmate a paranoid if he thinks that
people are against him?”

“No,” Wooley said. “Not unless he’s a graduate student in psychology. In that case I wouldn’t make any
bets.”

“Well, what are you doing here?”

“I’m observing humanity, what else? Look, I’ll give you an example of a genuine,
make-no-mistake-about-it, ninety-five-rating, excuse-making twitch from right down the hall. Do you
know Hector Leith?”

“No. I haven’t been here long enough,” Holland said. “I don’t know everybody’s name yet, and I
haven’t observed anybody twitching in the hall.”

Wooley shook his head. “You’d better be careful. You’ve got the makings of a very sharp tongue there.
Come along.” He swung his feet to the floor and led the way out into the hall.

Holland hesitated for a moment and then shrugged and followed. The corridor ran between a double row
of brown partition-board cubicles. On the walls of the corridor were photographs, a book-display rack,
notices, and two plaques celebrating the accomplishments of the department’s bowling and softball
teams. One of the photographs was of the previous year’s crop of graduate students. Wooley pointed at
the shortest person in the picture.

“That’s Hector Leith,” he said.

“I guess I have seen him around.”

“How old would you say he is?”

Holland looked at the picture and tried to remember the person he’d seen briefly in the hall. “Not more
than eighteen,” he said finally.

“He’s twenty-seven.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No,” Wooley said. “He’s twenty-seven, he looks eighteen or less, and he is a genuine twitch.”

The person in the photograph was only a few inches more than five feet tall, smooth-cheeked,
fresh-faced, elfish-looking. He might possibly have passed for a junior high school student except for his
air of tart awareness, and he certainly seemed out of place with the others in the picture. Wooley was
there, too, with his beard.

Back in their shared office, Holland returned to his swivel chair while Wooley sat on the edge of his desk.
“Now,” Wooley said, “he was drafted by the Army and tossed out after four weeks for emotional