"William Tenn - Wednesday's Child" - читать интересную книгу автора (William Tenn)

"Well," she considered. "There's that business about my blood pressure."
"Tell me about it," he urged. She told him.

Two dates later, she informed Fabian that Dr. Lorington wanted to see him. Alone.
He went all the way uptown to the old-fashioned brownstone, chewing his knuck­les in excitement. He had so many questions to ask!
Dr. Lorington was a tall, aged man with pale skin and absolutely white hair. He moved very slowly as he gestured his visitor to a chair, but his eyes rested intent and anxious on Fabian's face.
"Wednesday tells me you've been seeing a good deal of her, Mr. Balik. May I ask why?"
Fabian shrugged. "I like the girl. I'm interested in her."
"Interested, how? Interested clinically—as in a specimen?"
"What a way to put it, Doctor! She's a pretty girl, she's a nice girl, why should I be interested in her as a specimen?"
The doctor stroked an invisible beard on his chin, still watching Fabian very closely. "She's a pretty girl," he agreed, "but there are many pretty girls. You're a young man obviously on his way up in the world, and you're also obviously far out of Wednesday's class. From what she's told me—and mind you, it's been all on the positive side—I've gotten a definite impression that you look on her as a specimen, but a specimen, let us say, about which you feel a substantial collector's itch. Why you should feel this way, I don't know enough about you to say. But no matter how she rhapsodizes about you, I continue to feel strongly that you have no conventional, expected emotional interest in her. And now that I've seen you, I'm positive that this is so."
"Glad to hear she rhapsodizes about me." Fabian tried to squeeze out a bashful-type grin. "You have nothing to worry about, Doctor."
"I think there's quite a bit to worry about, quite a bit. Frankly, Mr. Balik, your appearance has confirmed my previous impressions: I am quite certain I don't like you. Furthermore, I don't like you for Wednesday."
Fabian thought for a moment, then shrugged. "That's too bad. But I don't think she'll listen to you. She's gone without male companionship too long, and she's too flattered by my going after her."
"I'm terribly afraid you're right. Listen to me, Mr. Balik. I'm very fond of Wednes­day and I know how unguarded she is. I ask you, almost as a father, to leave her alone. I've taken care of her since she arrived at the foundling home. I was responsible for keeping her case out of the medical journals so that she might have some chance for a normal life. At the moment, I'm retired from practice. Wednesday Gresham is my only regular patient. Couldn't you find it in your heart to be kind and have nothing more to do with her?"
"What's this about her being made, not born?" Fabian countered. "She says it was your idea."
The old man sighed and shook his head over his desktop for a long moment. "It's the only explanation that makes sense," he said at last, dispiritedly. "Considering the somatic inaccuracies and ambivalences."
Fabian clasped his hands and rubbed his elbows thoughtfully on the arms of his chair. "Did you ever think there might be another explanation? She might be a mu­tant, a new kind of human evolution, or the offspring of creatures from another world, say, who happened to be stranded on this planet."
"Highly unlikely," Dr. Lorington said. "None of these physical modifications is especially useful in any conceivable environment, with the possible exception of the constantly renewing teeth. Nor are the modifications fatal. They tend to be just—inconvenient. As a physician who has examined many human beings in my life, I would say that Wednesday is thoroughly, indisputably human. She is just a little—well, the word is amateurish."
The doctor sat up straight. "There is something else, Mr. Balik. I think it extremely inadvisable for people like Wednesday to have children of their own."
Fabian's eyes lit up in fascination. "Why? What would the children be like?"
"They might be like anything imaginable—or unimaginable. With so much dis­arrangement of the normal physical system, the modification in the reproductive functions must be enormous too. That's why I ask you, Mr. Balik, not to go on seeing Wednesday, not to go on stimulating her to thoughts of marriage. Because this is one girl that I am certain should not have babies!"
"We'll see." Fabian rose and offered his hand. "Thank you very much for your time and trouble, Doctor."
Dr. Lorington cocked his head and stared up at him. Then, without shaking the hand, he said in a quiet, even voice, "You are welcome. Goodbye, Mr. Balik."

Wednesday was naturally miserable over the antagonism between the two men. But there was very little doubt where her loyalties would lie in a crisis. All those years of determined emotional starvation had resulted in a frantic voracity. Once she allowed herself to think of Fabian romantically, she was done for. She told him that she did her work at the office—from which their developing affair had so far been success­fully screened—in a daze at the thought that he liked her.
Fabian found her homage delicious. Most women he had known began to treat him with a gradually sharpening edge of contempt as time went on. Wednesday be­came daily more admiring, more agreeable, more compliant.
True, she was by no means brilliant, but she was, he told himself, extremely pretty, and therefore quite presentable. Just to be on the safe side, he found an opportunity to confer with Mr. Slaughter, the senior partner of the firm, ostensibly on per­sonnel matters. He mentioned in passing that he was slightly interested in one of the girls in the secretarial pool. Would there be any high-echelon objection to that?
"Interested to the extent of perhaps marrying the girl?" Mr. Slaughter asked, study­ing him from under a pair of enormously thick eyebrows.
"Possibly. It might very well come to that, sir. If you have no ob—"
"No objection at all, my boy, no objection at all. I don't like executives flim-flamming around with their file-clerks as a general rule, but if it's handled quietly and ends in matrimony, it could be an excellent thing for the office. I'd like to see you married, and steadied down. It might give the other single people in the place some sensible ideas for a change. But mind you, Balik, no flim-flam. No hanky-panky, especially on office time!"
Satisfied, Fabian now devoted himself to separating Wednesday from Dr. Lorington. He pointed out to her that the old man couldn't live much longer and she needed a regular doctor who was young enough to be able to help her with the physical com­plexities she faced for the rest of her life. A young doctor like Jim Rudd, for example.
Wednesday wept, but was completely incapable of fighting him for long. In the end, she made only one condition—that Dr. Rudd preserve the secrecy that Lorington had initiated. She didn't want to become a medical journal freak or a newspaper sob story.
The reasons why Fabian agreed had only a little to do with magnanimity. He wanted to have her oddities for himself alone. Sandra he had worn on his breast, like a flashing jewel hung from a pendant. Wednesday he would keep in a tiny chamois bag, exam­ining her from time to time in a self-satisfied, miserly fashion.
And, after a while, he might have another, smaller jewel...
Jim Rudd accepted his conditions. And was astounded.
"There is no navel at all!" he ejaculated when he had rejoined Fabian in his study, after the first examination. "I've palpated the skin for scar tissue, but there's not the slightest hint of it. And that's not the half of it! She has no discernible systole and diastole. Man, do you know what that means?"
"I'm not interested right now," Fabian told him. "Later, maybe. Do you think you can help her with these physical problems when they come up?"
"Oh, sure. At least as well as that old fellow."
"What about children? Can she have them?"
Rudd spread his hands. "I don't see why not. For all her peculiarities, she's a re­markably healthy young woman. And we have no reason to believe that this condi­tion—whatever you want to call it—is hereditary. Of course, some part of it might be, in some strange way or other, but on the evidence.
They were married, just before the start of Fabian's vacation, at City Hall. They came back to the office after lunch and told everyone about it. Fabian had already hired a new secretary to replace his wife.
Two months later, Fabian had managed to get her pregnant.
He was amazed at how upset she became, considering the meekness he had in­duced in her from the beginning of their marriage. He tried to be stern and to tell her he would have none of this nonsense, Dr. Rudd had said there was every reason to expect that she would have a normal baby, and that was that. But it didn't work. He tried gentle humor, cajolery. He even took her in his arms and told her he loved her too much not to want to have a little girl like her. But that didn't work either.
"Fabian, darling," she moaned, "don't you understand? I'm not supposed to have a child. I'm not like other women."
He finally used something he had been saving as a last resort for this emergency. He took a book from the shelf and flipped it open. "I understand," he said. "It's half Dr. Lorington and his nineteenth-century superstitious twaddle, and half a silly little folk poem you read when you were a girl and that made a terrifying impression on you. Well, I can't do anything about Dr. Lorington at this point in your life, but I can do something about that poem. Here. Read this."
She read:

Birthdays, by B.L. Farjeon
Monday's child is fair of face,