"Kim Stanley Robinson - Fifty Degrees Below" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

belongings were here in the car, or upstairs in his office, or in boxes at UCSD, or in
storage units in Encinitas, California, or down the road in Arlington, Virginia. The fact
that stuff was in storage showed how much it really mattered. By and large he was free
of worldly things. At age forty-three he no longer needed them. That felt a little strange,
actually, but not necessarily bad. Did it feel good? It was hard to tell. It simply felt
strange.
He got out of his car and took the elevator to the third floor, where there was a little
exercise room, with a men's room off its entryway that included showers. In his shoulder
bag he carried his laptop, his cell phone, his bathroom kit, and a change of clothes. The
three shower stalls stood behind white curtains, near an area with benches and lockers.
Beyond it extended the room containing toilets, urinals, and a counter of sinks under a
long mirror.
Frank knew the place, having showered and changed in it many times after runs at
lunch with Edgardo and Kenzo and Bob and the others. Now he surveyed it with a new
regard. It was as he remembered: an adequate bathroom, public but serviceable.
He undressed and got in one of the showers. A flood of hot water, almost industrial in
quantity, washed away some of the stiffness of his uncomfortable night. Of course no
one would want to be seen showering there every day. Not that anyone was watching,
but some of the morning exercisers would eventually notice.
A membership in some nearby exercise club would provide an alternative bathroom.
What else did one need?
Somewhere to sleep, of course. The Honda would not suffice. If he had a van, and an
exercise club membership, and this locker room, and his office upstairs, and the men's
rooms up there.... As for food, the city had a million restaurants.
What else?
Nothing he could think of. Many people more or less lived in this building, all the
NSF hardcores who spent sixty or seventy hours a week here, ate their meals at their
desks or in the neighborhood restaurants, only went home to sleep—and these were
people with families, with kids, homes, pets, partners!
In a crowd like that it would be hard to stick out.
He got out of the shower, dried off (a stack of fresh white towels was there at hand),
shaved, dressed.
 He glanced in the mirror over the sink, feeling a bit shy. He didn't look at himself in
mirrors anymore, never met his eye when shaving, stayed focused on the skin under the
blade. He didn't know why. Maybe it was because he did not resemble his conception of
himself, which was vaguely scientific and serious, say Darwinesque; and yet there in the
glass getting shaved was always the same old sun-fried jock.
But this time he looked. To his surprise he saw that he looked normal— that was to
say, the same as always. Normative. No one would be able to guess by his appearance
that he was sleep-deprived, that he had been thinking some pretty abnormal thoughts,
or, crucially, that he had spent the previous night in his car because he no longer had a
home.
"Hmm," he told his reflection.
He took the elevator up to the tenth floor, still thinking it over. He stood in the
doorway of his new office, evaluating the place by these new inhabitory criteria. It was a
true room, rather than a carrel in a larger space, so it had a door he could close. It
boasted one of the big inner windows looking into the building's central atrium, giving
him a direct view of the big colored mobile that filled the atrium's upper half.
This view was unfortunate, actually. He didn't want to look at that mobile, for not too
long ago he had found himself hanging upside down from it, in the middle of the night,