"Connie Willis - Nonstop to Portales" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

appointment with Cross at ten, I thought. "I got in last night. Bisbee didn't take as long as I thought it
would."
"Hudd's our only contact in Portales," he said.
"Anybody in Clovis? Or Tucumcari?"
"No," he said, too fast to have looked them up. "There's nobody much in that part of the state."
"They're big into peanuts here. You want me to try and talk to some peanut farmers?"
"Why don't you just take the day off?" he said.
"Yeah, thanks," I said, and hung up and went back downstairs.
There was a dried-up old guy at the desk now, but the word must have spread. "You wanna see
something really interesting?" he said. "Down in Roswell's where the Air Force has got that space alien
they won't let anybody see. You take Highway 70 south—"
"Didn't anybody famous ever live here in Portales?" I asked. "A vice-president? Billy the Kid's
cousin?" He shook his head.
"What about buildings? A railroad station? A courthouse?"
"There's a courthouse, but it's closed on Sundays. The Air Force claims it wasn't a spaceship, that it
was some kind of spy plane, but I know a guy who saw it coming down. He said it was shaped like a big
long cigar and had lights all over it."
"Highway 70?" I said, to get away from him. "Thanks," and went out into the parking lot.
I could see the top of the courthouse over the dry-looking treetops, only a couple of blocks away. It
was closed on Sundays, but it was better than sitting in my room watching Falwell and thinking about the
job I was going to have to take unless something happened between now and tomorrow morning. And
better than getting back in the car to go see something Roswell had made up so it'd have a tourist
attraction. And maybe I'd get lucky, and the courthouse would turn out to be the site of the last hanging in
New Mexico. Or the first peace march. I walked downtown.
The streets around the courthouse looked like your typical small-town post-WalMart business
district. No drugstore, no grocery store, no dimestore. There was an Anthony's standing empty, and a
restaurant that would be in another six months, a Western clothing store with a dusty denim shirt and two
concho belts in the window, a bank with a sign in the window saying new location.
The courthouse was red brick and looked like every other courthouse from Nelson, Nebraska, to
Tyler, Texas. It stood in a square of grass and trees. I walked around it twice, looking at the war
memorial and the flagpole and trying not to think about Hammond and Bisbee. It hadn't taken as long as
I'd thought because I hadn't even been able to get in to see the buyer, and Hammond hadn't cared
enough to even ask how it had gone. Or to bother to look up his contacts in Tucumcari. And it wasn't
just that it was Sunday. He'd sounded that way the last two times I'd called him. Like a man getting ready
to give up, to pull out.
Which meant I should take Cross's job offer and be grateful. "It's a forty-hour week," he'd said.
"You'll have time to work on your inventions."
Right. Or else settle into a routine and forget about them. Five years ago when I'd taken the job with
Hammond, Denny'd said, "You'll be able to see the sights. The Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore,
Yellowstone." Yeah, well, I'd seen them. Cave of the Winds, Amazing Mystery House, Indian curios,
Genuine Live Jackalope.
I walked around the courthouse square again and then went down to the railroad tracks to look at
the grain elevator and walked back to the courthouse again. The whole thing took ten minutes. I thought
about walking over to the university, but it was getting hot. In another half hour the grass would start
browning and the streets would start getting soft, and it would be even hotter out here than in my room. I
started back to the Portales Inn.
The street I was on was shady, with white wooden houses, the kind I'd probably live in if I took
Cross's job, the kind I'd work on my inventions in. If I could get the parts for them at Southwest
Agricultural Supply. Or WalMart. If I really did work on them. If I didn't just give up after a while.
I turned down a side street. And ran into a dead end. Which was pretty appropriate, under the