"Connie Willis - To Say Nothing of the Dog (txt)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

One of the first symptoms of time-lag is a tendency to maudlin sentimentality, like an Irishman in his cups or a Victorian poet cold-sober. Carruthers had been on at least four drops in the past day, two of them within hours of each other, and who knew how many others researching the organ pipes. He’d said himself he hadn’t had any sleep.

I frowned, trying to remember the checklist of time-lag symptoms. Maudlin sentimentality, difficulty in distinguishing sounds, fatigue—but he’d heard the bells, and everyone associated with Lady Schrapnell’s reconstruction project was suffering from sleep deprivation. The only sleep I’d gotten in the past week was during the St. Crispin’s Day War Effort Bazaar. I’d dozed off during the “Welcome” and slept through half the “Introductions of the Organizing Committee.”

What were the other symptoms? Tendency to become distracted by irrelevancies. Slowness in answering. Blurred vision.

“The star,” I said. “What does it look like?”

“What do you mean what does it look like?” Carruthers said, not at all slow to answer. “It looks like astar.”

The bells stopped chiming, their echoes lingering in the smoky air.

“What do youthink a star looks like?” Carruthers said, and stomped off toward the verger.

Irritability was a definite symptom. And the net guidelines specifically stated that time-lag sufferers were to be immediately “removed from the environment” and from duty, but if I did that, I would have to explain to Lady Schrapnell what we were doing in Oxford instead of Coventry.

Which was why I was here poking about in the rubble in the first place, because I didn’t want to try and explain why I hadn’t landed at eight o’clock on the fourteenth in front of the cathedral like I’d been supposed to, and it was no good trying to explain that it was because of the slippage because Lady Schrapnell didn’t believe in slippage. Or time-lag.

No, so long as Carruthers wasn’t completely incoherent, it was better to stay here, find the bishop’s bird stump, and then go back and be able to tell Lady Schrapnell, yes, it had been in the cathedral during the raid, and then get some sleep. Sleep, that knits the ragged sleeve of non-AFS uniforms, that soothes the sooty brow and shuts out sorrow, blessing the weary soul with blissful, healing rest—

Carruthers came over, looking neither fatigued nor distracted. Good.

“Ned!” he said. “Didn’t you hear me calling?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking about something.”

“You must have been. I’ve been calling for five minutes,” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

I must have misheard that, too, or else Carruthers was more time-lagged than I’d thought. “Dookie?” I said cautiously.

“Yes, Dookie!” he said. “Did she have Dookie with her?”

Oh, no, I was going to have to get him back to Oxford without making the verger suspicious, get him to Infirmary, and then try to get back here to finish searching the cathedral and probably end up in a marrows field halfway to Liverpool.

“Ned, can’t you hear me?” Carruthers was saying worriedly. “I said, ‘Did she have Dookie with her?’”

“With whom?” I said, wondering how I was going to convince him he needed to be taken out. Time-lag victims never think they’re time-lagged. “Lady Schrapnell?”

“No,” he said, very irritably. “Her Majesty. The Queen. When she commissioned us to come up here. ‘Their beautiful, beautiful cathedral,’ and all that.” He pointed to the verger, who was heading toward us. “He asked me if she had Dookie with her when we saw her, and I didn’t have any idea who that was.”

I didn’t either. Dookie. It seemed unlikely that that would have been her nickname for the King. For her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, perhaps? No, Edward had already abdicated by 1940, and the Queen wasn’t calling him anything.

The Queen’s dog, I thought, but that didn’t help particularly. In her later years as the Queen Mum, she’d had Welsh corgis, but what had she had during World War II? A Yorkshire terrier? A toy spaniel? And what gender, if any? And what if Dookie was her maid instead? Or a nickname for one of the princesses?

The verger came up. “You were asking about Dookie,” I said. “Afraid Dookie wasn’t with Her Majesty. Up at Windsor for the duration. Terrified of the bombs, you see.”

“It takes some of them that way,” the verger said, looking over toward where Mr. Spivens and the new recruit were. “Weak nerves.”

The new recruit had finally figured out how the pocket torch worked. He’d switched it on and was playing the beam on the blackened walls of the chancel and on Mr. Spivens, who was apparently digging a tunnel into the rubble next to the steps.