"Vonnegut, Kurt - Galapagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

So Mary tried to be happy about that, to say and mean that it was time he loosened up and had some fun -- although they had always had a lot of fun on weekends and during vacations, and at work, as far as that went. But a miasma overlay this unexpected escapade. And Roy himself, during their early supper, seemed puzzled by the afternoon. So that was that. He didn't think he would do it again, and they could forget the incident, except maybe to laugh about it now and then.
But then, right before bedtime, while they were staring at the glowing embers in the fieldstone fireplace which Roy had built with his own two horny hands, Roy said, "There's more."
"There's more of what?" said Mary.
"About this afternoon," he said. "One of the places I went was the travel agency." There was only one such establishment in Ilium, and not doing well.
"So?" she said.
"I signed us up for something," he said. It was as though he were remembering a dream. "It's all paid for. It's all taken care of. It's done. In November, you and I are flying to Ecuador, and we are going to take 'the Nature Cruise of the Century.'"

o

Roy and Mary Hepburn were the very first persons to respond to the advertising and publicity program for the maiden voyage of the _Bahнa de Darwin_, which ship was nothing but a keel and a pile of blueprints in Malmц, Sweden, at the time. The Ilium travel agent had just received a poster announcing the cruise. He was just Scotch-taping it to his wall when Roy Hepburn walked in.

o

If I may interject a personal note: I myself had been working as a welder in Malmц for about a year, but the _Bahнa de Darwin_ had not yet materialized sufficiently so as to require my services. I would literally lose my head to that steel maiden only when springtime came. Question: Who hasn't lost his or her head in the springtime?

o

But to continue:
The travel poster in Ilium depicted a very strange bird standing on the edge of a volcanic island, looking out at a beautiful white motor ship churning by. This bird was black and appeared to be the size of a large duck, but it had a neck as long and supple as a snake. The queerest thing about it, though, was that it seemed to have no wings, which was almost the truth. This sort of bird was endemic to the Galбpagos Islands, meaning that it was found there and nowhere else on the planet. Its wings were tiny and folded flat against its body, in order that it might swim as fast and deep as a fish could. This was a much better way to catch fish than, as so many fish-eating birds were required to do, to wait for fish to come to the surface and then crash down on them with beaks agape. This very successful bird was called by human beings a "flightless cormorant." It could go where the fish were. It didn't have to wait for fish to make a fatal error.
Somewhere along the line of evolution, the ancestors of such a bird must have begun to doubt the value of their wings, just as, in 1986, human beings were beginning to question seriously the desirability of big brains.
If Darwin was right about the Law of Natural Selection, cormorants with small wings, just shoving off from shore like fishing boats, must have caught more fish than the greatest of their aviators. So they mated with each other, and those children of theirs who had the smallest wings became even better fisherpeople, and so on.

o

Now the very same sort of thing has happened to people, but not with respect to their wings, of course, since they never had wings -- but with respect to their hands and brains instead. And people don't have to wait any more for fish to nibble on baited hooks or blunder into nets or whatever. A person who wants a fish nowadays just goes after one like a shark in the deep blue sea.
It's so easy now.









8



Even back in January, there were any number of reasons Roy Hepburn should not have signed up for that cruise. It wasn't evident then that a world economic crisis was coming, and that the people of Ecuador would be starving when the ship was supposed to sail. But there was the matter of Mary's job. She did not yet know that she was about to be laid off, to be forced into early retirement, so she could not see how she, in good conscience, could take off three weeks in late November and early December, right in the middle of a semester.
Also, although she had never been there, she had grown very bored with the Galбpagos Archipelago. There was such a wealth of films and slides and books and articles about the islands, which she had used over and over in her courses, that she could not imagine any surprise that might await her there. Little did she know.
She and Roy hadn't been out of the United States during their entire marriage. If they were going to kick up their heels and take a really glamorous trip, she thought, she would much rather go to Africa, where the wildlife was so much more thrilling, and the survival schemes were so much more dangerous. When all was said and done, the creatures of the Galбpagos Islands were a pretty listless bunch, when compared with rhinos and hippos and lions and elephants and giraffes and so on.
The prospect of the voyage, in fact, made her confess to a close friend, "All of a sudden I have this feeling that I never want to see another blue-footed booby as long as I live!"
Little did she know.

o

Mary muted her misgivings about the trip, though, when talking to Roy, confident that he would perceive on his own that he had suffered a mild brain malfunction. But by March, Roy was out of his job, and Mary knew she was going to be let go in June. The timing of the cruise, anyway, became practical. And the cruise loomed huge in Roy's increasingly erratic imagination as ". . . the only good thing we've got to look forward to."

o