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

centimeters tall, and bears a striking physical resemblance to that noblest of all meece,
Bullwinkle—save that Mucus is as potbellied as the Ashley stove in my living room. He
is a pale translucent brown from the tips of his rack down to wherever the Plimsoll line
happens to be, and pale translucent green thereafter. Picture Bullwinkle gone to fat and
extremely seasick. His full name and station—Mucus Moose, the Mucilage Machine—are
spelled out in raised letters on his round little tummy.
If you squeeze him gently right there, green glue comes out of his nostrils. . . .
If you don't understand why I love him so dearly, just let it go. Chalk it up to
eccentricity or cabin fever—congenital insanity, I won't argue—but he was irreplaceable
and special to me, and he was nowhere to be found. On rewind-search of my head I found
that the last place I remembered putting him was in my jacket pocket, in order to fasten
down the Styrofoam padding on Number Two hole in the outhouse, and he was not in the
said pocket, and the last time that jacket pocket had been far enough from vertical for
Mucus to fall out had been—
—that afternoon, by the sap pot, halfway up the frigging Mountain, more than a
mile up into the woods. . . .
I have a special personal mantra for moments like that, but I believe that even in
these enlightened times it is unprintable. I chanted it aloud as I filled both stoves with
wood, pulled on a second shirt and pair of pants, added a sweater, zipped up the
Snowmobile boots, put on the scarf and jacket and gloves and cap and stomped into the
back hall like a space-suited astronaut entering the airlock, or a hardhat diver going into
the decompression chamber.
The analogies are rather apt. When I popped the hook-and-eye and shouldered the
kitchen door open (its spring hinge complaining bitterly enough to be heard over the
general din), I entered a room whose ambient temperature was perhaps fifteen Celsius
degrees colder than that of the kitchen—and the back hall was at least that much warmer
than the world outside. I sealed the kitchen door behind me with the turnbuckle, zipped
my jacket all the way up to my nose, took the heavy-duty flashlight from its perch near
the chainsaw, and thumbed open the latch of the outside door.
It promptly flew open, hit me sharply in the face and across the shin, and knocked
the flashlight spinning. I turned away from the incoming blast of wind-driven snow, in
time to see the flashlight knock over the can of chainsaw gas/oil mixture, which spilled
all over the split firewood. Not the big wood intended for the living room Ashley, the
small stuff for the kitchen stove. I sleep above that kitchen stove at nights, and I was
going to be smelling burning oil in my sleep for the next week or so.
I started my mantra over again from the beginning, more rhythmically and at
twice the volume, retrieved the flashlight, and stomped out into the dark and stormy
night, to rescue fifty cents worth of flexible plastic and a quarter-liter of green glue. Love
is strange.
***
I had been mistaken about those banshees. They hadn't been inside my stovepipes,
only hollering down them. They were out here, much too big to fit down a chimney and
loud enough to fill the world, manifesting as ghostly curtains of snow that were torn apart
by the wind as fast as they formed. I hooked the door shut before me, made a perfectly
futile attempt to zip my jacket up higher—all the way up is as high as a zipper goes—and
pushed away from the Hotel to meet them.
The woodshed grunted a dire warning as I passed. I ignored it; it had been
threatening to fall over ever since I had known it, back in the days when it had been a
goatshed. As I went by the outhouse I half turned to see if the new plastic window I'd
stapled up last week had torn itself to pieces yet, and as I saw that it had, a shingle left the