"Robert Reed - Roxie" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reed Robert)

and I’m not in the mood to shout. He moves ahead and crosses the four-
lane road, and when we reach that place, Roxie pauses, smelling where
her friend has just been and leaking a sorry little whine.

Home again, I pill my dog. She takes Proin to control bedwetting,
plus half a metronidazole to fight diarrhea. She used to take a full metro,
but there was an endless night a few weeks ago when she couldn’t rest,
not indoors or out. She barked at nothing, which is very strange for her.
Maybe a high-pitched sound was driving her mad. But our vet warned
that she could have a tendency toward seizures, and the metro can
increase their likelihood and severity. Which is why I pulled her back to
just half a pill in the morning.

I pack the medicine into a handful of canned dog food, stinky and
prepared with the senior canine in mind. She waits eagerly and gobbles
up the treat in a bite, happily licking the linoleum where I dropped it,
relishing that final taste.

Before six in the morning, I pour orange juice and go down to my
basement office. My PC boots up without incident. I discover a fair
amount of e-mail, none of it important. Then I start jumping between sites
that offer a good look at science and world events. Sky and Telescope has
a tiny article about an asteroid of uncertain size and imprecise orbit. But
after a couple of nights of observation, early estimates describe an object
that might be a kilometer in diameter, and in another two years, it seems
that this intruder will pass close to the Earth, bringing with it a one-in-six-
thousand chance of an impact.

“But that figure won’t stand up,” promises one astronomer. “This
happens all the time. Once we get more data, this danger is sure to
evaporate to nothing.”

****

My future wife was a reporter for the Omaha newspaper. I knew
her because in those days, a lot of my friends were reporters. On a sultry
summer evening, she and I went to the same Fourth of July party; over
the smell of gunpowder, Leslie mentioned that she’d recently bought a
husky puppy.

Grinning, I admitted that I’d always been intrigued by sled dogs.

“You should come meet Roxie sometime,” she said.

“Why Roxie?” I asked.

“Foxie Roxie,” she explained. “She’s a red husky. To me, she sort
of looks like an enormous fox.”

Her dog was brownish red and white, with a dark red mask across