"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

and skin resisting the sag of age. His
forehead arced down into thin nose
cartilage, and his lower lip shaded
indistinctly into a long chin. Had he not
been anemic, his crew cut might have made
him an astronaut. His extraordinary moist
eyes monitored me with the soft hurt of
animals, encouraging me to say the worst.
He seemed not to blink, like a camp refugee
or feebleminded ward of state.
He wore a forgettable light suit, a narrow
maroon tie not seen since the fifties, and an
immaculate oxford button-down, carefully
ironed but pilled to exhaustion around the
collar. He emitted the aura—accurate, it
turned out—that he found buying clothes
too embarrassing. He was over the median
age by twenty years. As I stared, wondering
if this was an assault, the figure said, in a
voice rattling like a cracked distributor,
"Excuse me, Miss. There's been a mistake." I
hadn't a clue what he was talking about.
Worse—the ultimate terror for my
profession—I had no source to appeal to.
Just his being here disturbed me; at that
hour, in autumn, the library was the tacit
domain of retirees and transients. A male of
employable age, able-bodied albeit as
emaciated as a Cranach Christ, upset the
statistics. "There's been a mistake. I'm afraid
the date is off."
Influenced by earlier having identified the
relative strengths of shipmast flags and Aldis
lamps, I thought I'd been singled out to
receive a cryptogram canceling some covert
operation. All-points bulletin: Date off. His
fastidiously soft-toned grammar, in best
academic fashion, removed all trace of
personal involvement: There's been..., The
date is.... I gawked at him, mutely rolling my
head to either side, Galileo's pendulum
experiments with my brain the deadweight.
"I apologize for being so unnecessarily
elliptical," he added. A frail finger directed
my attention to the Today in History. "This
account, which I don't for a minute doubt to
be accurate in particulars, is, unfortunately,
irrelevant." He gave me an apologetic smile,
an attempt to be amenable despite having
just run over my pet dog. I still produced