"Kim Stanley Robinson - Forty Signs of Rain" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

There was a hesitant knock on his opened door, and he looked up.

“Oh hi, Yann, how are you?”

“I’m good Leo, thanks. I’m just coming by to say good-bye. I’m back to Pasadena now, my job here is
finished.”

“Too bad. I bet you could have helped us figure out this pig in a poke we just bought.”

“Really?”

Yann’s face brightened like a child’s. He was a true mathematician, and had what Leo considered to be
the standard mathematician personality: smart, spacy, enthusiastic, full of notions. All these qualities were
a bit under the surface, until you really got him going. As Marta had remarked, not unkindly (for her), if it
weren’t for the head tilt and the speed-talking, he wouldn’t have seemed like a mathematician at all.
Whatever; Leo liked him, and his work on protein identification had been really interesting, and
potentially very helpful.

“Actually, I don’t know what we’ve got yet,” Leo admitted. “It’s likely to be a biology problem, but
who knows? You sure have been helpful with our selection protocols.”

“Thanks, I appreciate that. I may be back anyway, I’ve got a project going with Sam’s math team that
might pan out. If it does they’ll try to hire me on another temporary contract, he says.”

“That’s good to hear. Well, have fun in Pasadena in the meantime.”

“Oh I will. See you soon.”

And their best biomath guy slipped out the door.



CHARLIE QUIBLER had barely woken when Anna left for work. He got up an hour later to his own
alarm, woke up Nick with difficulty, got him to dress and eat, put the still-sleeping Joe in his car seat
while Nick climbed in the other side of the car. “Have you got your backpackand your lunch?”—this not
always being the case—and off to Nick’s school. They dropped him off, returned home to fall asleep
again on the couch, Joe never waking during the entire process. An hour or so later he would rouse them
both with his hungry cries, and then the day would really begin, the earlier interval like a problem dream
that always played out the same.

“Joey and Daddy!” Charlie would say then, or “Joe and Dad at home, here we go!” or “How about
breakfast? Here—how about you get into your playpen for a second, and I’ll go warm up some of
Mom’s milk. ”

This had always worked like a charm with Nick, and sometimes Charlie forgot and put Joe down in the
old blue plastic playpen in the living room, but if he did Joe would let out a scandalized howl the moment
he saw where he was. Joe refused to associate with baby things; even getting him into the car seat or the
baby backpack or the stroller was a matter of very strict invariability. Where choices were known to be
possible, Joe rejected the baby stuff as an affront to his dignity.