"Richard Wilson - Mother to the World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Richard)

"The very same," he agreed. Siss never referred to herself
as a maid, which was what she had been. "And so when I
asked Bill if he could put me up, I thought it would be in his
old bachelor apartment. He said sure, just like that, and I
didn't find out till I got there, late in the evening, that he had
a new wife and was having a house party and had invited two
couples from out of town to stay over."
"I gave my room to Mr. and Mrs. Glena, from Columbus,"
Siss said.
"And the Torquemadas, of Seville, had the regular guest
room." Whoever they were; he didn't remember names the
way she did. "So that left two displaced persons, you and
me."
"Except for the Nassers."
The Nassers, as she pronounced it, were the two self-con-
tained rooms in the Cantwell basement. The NASAs, or the
Nasas, was what Cantwell called them because the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration had given him a con-
tract to study the behavior of human beings in a closed
system.
Actually the money had gone to Columbia University,
where Cantwell was a professor of mechanical and aerospace
engineering.
"A sealed-off environment," Rolfe said. "But because
Columbia didn't have the space just at that time, and because
the work was vital, NASA gave Cantwell permission to build
the rooms in his own home. They were -still are -in his
basement, and that's where you and I slept that fateful night
when the world ended."
"I still don't understand."
"We were completely sealed off in there," Rolfe said. "We
weren't breathing Earth air and we weren't connected in any
way to the rest of the world. We might as well have been out
in space or on the moon. So when it happened to everybody
else to Professor and Mrs. Cantwell, and to the Glenns and
the Torquemadas and to the Nassers in Egypt and the Joneses
in Jones Beach and all the people at Columbia, and in Wash-
ington and Moscow and Pretoria and London and Peoria and
Medicine Hat and La Jolla and all those places all over it
didn't happen to us. That's because Professor Cantwell was a
smart man and his closed systems worked."
"And we were saved."
"That's one way of looking at it."
"What's the other way?"
"We were doomed."
From his notebooks:
Siss asked why I'm so sure there's nobody but us left in
the whole world. A fair question. Of course I'm not abso-
lutely positively cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, swear-on-a
Bible convinced that there isn't a poor live slob hidden away