"Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

matter how nobly motivated their curiosities.

Mrs. Rumfoord and her staff answered none of the tens of thousands of questions that were
put to them about the materializations. Mrs. Rumfoord felt that she owed the world very little
indeed in the way of information. She discharged that incalculably small obligation by issuing a
report twenty-four hours after each materialization. Her report never exceeded one hundred
words. It was posted by her butler in a glass case bolted to the wall next to the one entrance to
the estate.
The one entrance to the estate was an Alice-in-Wonderland door in the west wall. The door
was only four-and-a-half feet high. It was made of iron and held shut by a great Yale lock.
The wide gates of the estate were bricked in.
The reports that appeared in the glass case by the iron door were uniformly bleak and peevish.
They contained information that only served to sadden any. one with a shred of curiosity. They
told the exact time at which Mrs. Rumfoord's husband Winston and his dog Kazak materialized,
and the exact time at which they dematerialized. The states of health of the man and his dog were
invariably appraised as good. The reports implied that Mrs. Rumfoord's husband could see the
past and the future clearly, but they neglected to give examples of sights in either direction.

Now the crowd had been decoyed away from the estate to permit the untroubled arrival of a
rented limousine at the small iron door in the west wall. A slender man in the clothes of an
Edwardian dandy got out of the limousine and showed a paper to the policeman guarding the
door. He was disguised by dark glasses and a false beard.
The policeman nodded, and the man unlocked the door himself with a key from his pocket. He
ducked inside, and slammed the door behind himself with a clang.
The limousine drew away.
Beware of the dog! said a sign over the small iron door. The fires of the summer sunset
flickered among the razors and needles of broken glass set in concrete on the top of the wall.
The man who had let himself in was the first person ever invited by Mrs. Rumfoord to a
materialization. He was not a great scientist. He was not even well educated. He had been thrown
out of the University of Virginia in the middle of his freshman year. He was Malachi Constant of
Hollywood, California, the richest American — and a notorious rakehell.
Beware of the dog! the sign outside the small iron door had said. But inside the wall there was
only a dog's skeleton. It wore a cruelly spiked collar that was chained to the wall. It was the
skeleton of a very large dog — a mastiff. Its long teeth meshed. Its skull and jaws formed a
cunningly articulated, harmless working model of a flesh-ripping machine. The jaws closed so
— clack. Here had been the bright eyes, there the keen ears, there the suspicious nostrils, there
the carnivore's brain. Ropes of muscle had hooked here and here, had brought the teeth together
in flesh so — clack.
The skeleton was symbolic — a prop, a conversation piece installed by a woman who spoke to
almost no one. No dog had died at its post there by the wall. Mrs. Rumfoord had bought the
bones from a veterinarian, had had them bleached and varnished and wired together. The
skeleton was one of Mrs. Rumfoord's many bitter and obscure comments on the nasty tricks time
and her husband had played on her.
Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord had seventeen million dollars. Mrs. Winston Niles Rumfoord
had the highest social position attainable in the United States of America. Mrs. Winston Niles
Rumfoord was healthy and handsome, and talented, too.
Her talent was as a poetess. She had published anonymously a slim volume of poems called
Between Timid and Timbuktu. It had been reasonably well received.
The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small
dictionaries relate to time.