"Spider Robinson - The Mind 2 - Time Pressure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

roll in off the water and darken the sky, there is usually the glow of Saint John, New
Brunswick on the horizon, tinting the underside of clouds sixty kilometers away across
the Bay, mitigating the darkness. (In those days, just after Canada went totally metric, I
would have thought "forty miles" instead of sixty klicks. Habits can be changed.)
The day had been chilly for late April and the wind had been steady from the
south, so I was not at all surprised when the snowstorm began just after sundown.
(Maybe you live somewhere that doesn't have snow in April; if so, I hope you appreciate
it.) It was not a full-scale mankiller blizzard, the sort where you have to crack the attic
window for breathing air and dig tunnels to the woodshed and the outhouse: a bit too late
in the year for that.
Nonetheless it was indisputably a dark and stormy night in 1973—when suddenly
the snot ran out. . . .
***
Nothing less could have made me suit up and go outside on such a night. Even a
chimney fire might not have done it. There is a rope strung from my back porch to my
outhouse during the winter, because when the big gusts sail in off that tabletop icewater
and flay the North Mountain with snow and stinging hail, a man can become hopelessly
lost on his way to the shitter and freeze to death within bowshot of his house. This storm
was not of that caliber, but neither was it a Christmas-cardy sort of snowing, with little
white petals drifting gently and photogenically down through the stillness. Windows
rattled or hummed, their inner and outer coverings of plastic insulation shuddered and
crackled, the outer doors strained and snarled at their fastenings, wind whistled through
weatherstripping in a dozen places, shingles complained and threatened to leave,
banshees took up residence in both my stovepipes (the two stoves, inflamed, raved and
roared back at them), and beneath all the local noise could be heard the omnipresent
sound of the wind trying to flog the forest to death and the Bay trying to smash the stone
shore to flinders. They've both been at it for centuries, and one day they'll win.
My kitchen is one of the tightest rooms in Heartbreak Hotel; on both north and
south it is buffered by large insulated areas of putatively dead air (the seldom-used,
sealed-up porch on the Bay side and the back hall on the south). Nevertheless the
kerosene lamp on the table flickered erratically enough to make shadows leap around the
room like Baryshnikov on speed. From where I sat, rocking by the kitchen stove and
sipping coffee, I could see that I had left about a dozen logs of maple and birch piled up
on the sawhorse outside. I was not even remotely inclined to go back out there and get
them under cover.
Dinner was over, the dishes washed, the kitchen stove's watertank refilled and
warming, both stoves fed and cooking nicely, chores done. I cast about for some stormy
night's entertainment, but the long hard winter just ending had sharply depleted the
supply. I had drunk the last of my wine and homebrew a few weeks back, had smoked up
most of the previous year's dope crop, read all the books in the house and all those to be
borrowed on the Mountain, played every record and reel of tape I owned more than often
enough to be sick of them, and the weather was ruining reception of CBC Radio (the only
tolerable station of the three available, and incidentally one of the finest on Earth). So I
decided to put in some time on the dulcimer I was building, and that meant that I needed
Mucus the Moose, and when I couldn't find him after a Class One Search of the house I
played back memory tape and realized, with a sinking feeling, that I was going to have to
go outside after all.
I might not have done it for a friend—but if Mucus was out there, I had no choice.
Mucus the Moose is one of my most cherished possessions, one of my only
mementoes of a very dear dead friend. He (the moose, not the friend) is about fifteen