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

“All of them that had been crawling about in a burnt-out cathedral, I should think,” I said.

“A real cat!” he said, dusting off his non-AFS coveralls and following me. “It’s just so amazing, seeing a creature that’s been extinct for nearly forty years. I’ve never seen one before.”

“Take hold of that end,” I said, pointing at a length of stone gutter.

“It’sall so amazing,” he said. “Actuallybeing here, where it all started.”

“Or ended,” I said dryly. “Not that one, the one on top.”

He lifted, his knees straight, staggering a little. “It’s just so exciting! Lady Schrapnell said working on Coventry Cathedral would be a rewarding experience, and it is! Seeingthis and knowing that it isn’t really destroyed, that it’s rising out of the ashes at this very minute, resurrected and restored to all its former glory.”

He sounded time-lagged, but probably wasn’t. All of Lady Schrapnell’s new recruits sound time-lagged.

“How many drops have you done?” I asked.

“This is my first,” he said, his face eager, “and I still can’t quite believe it. I mean, here we are in1940, searching for the bishop’s bird stump, unearthing a treasure of the past, the beauty of a bygone era.”

I looked at him. “You’ve never actually seen the bishop’s bird stump, have you?”

“No,” he said, “but it must be truly amazing. It changed Lady Schrapnell’s great-great-grandmother’s life, you know.”

“I know, ” I said. “It’s changed all of our lives.”

“Here!” Carruthers called from the Drapers’ Chapel. He was on his knees. “I’ve found something.”

He was in the wrong direction for blast, and at first all I could see was a tangle of timbers, but Carruthers was pointing at something in the midst of the tangle.

“I see it!” the verger said. “It looks like metal.”

“Use your torch,” Carruthers said to the new recruit.

The recruit, who’d forgotten how to switch it on, messed with it for a bit and then switched it on in Carruthers’ face.

“Not on me,” Carruthers said. “Under there!” He snatched it away from him and shone it on the pile of timbers, and I caught a glint of metal. My heart leaped.

“Get those timbers off there,” I said, and we all went at the pile.

“Here it comes,” the verger said, and Carruthers and the new recruit hauled it up out of the rubble.

The metal was black with soot, and it was badly crushed and twisted, but I knew what it was, and so did the verger. “It’s one of the sand buckets,” he said, and burst into tears.

It was physically impossible for the verger to be suffering from time-lag, unless it was somehow contagious. He was giving a good imitation of it, though.

“I saw that bucket only last night,” he blubbered into a very sooty handkerchief, “and now look at it.”

“We’ll clean it up,” Carruthers said, patting him awkwardly. “It’ll be as good as new,” which I doubted.

“The handle’s blown clean off,” the verger said. He blew his nose loudly. “I filled that bucket with sand myself. Hung it up by the south door myself.”