"Robert F. Young - Structural Defect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

 "Oh yes. Of course," Melray said. "But I thought—"
"Your application will come up for approval in due course. Definitely within the next ten years. You
may be confident of that. Was there anything else you wanted to know, sir?"
Melray stepped back from the window, bumping against the first man in the long line of men behind
him. He felt numb. "No, that's all," he heard himself say. "Thanks."

Center Boulevard was a wide straight river with white high banks of buildings. It was filled now with
glaring after-noon sunlight and homeward-hurrying people. Melray left the airbus a block from The Bird
House. He felt like stretching his legs a little, soak-ing up some summer sun. Air-buses were fine—you
couldn't ask for better transportation—but they were crowded some-times, and very little of the bright
fresh air they traveled through ever penetrated as far as their interiors.
There was a long queue of people lining the dazzling facades. Melray walked past them, wondering
what new deepie had opened, wondering why any deepie would open at such an unconventional hour.
There was no kaleidoscopic marquee at the end of the queue, however. When he reached the end of the
queue he discovered an ordinary store front with an ordinary sign over it that said, The Bird House.
Beneath the sign a flustered little man was stand-ing, waving his arms and shout-ing. "Go away, go
away!" he was shouting. "I tell you I haven't got any bluebirds. I haven't got any!"


IT WAS nice to have a retentive memory; to be able to recall an obscure little store on an obscure
little side street that you'd visited only once, and quite a long time ago at that. Melray was rather pleased
with himself when he left the airbus at Center 6-41. He was even more pleased with himself when he
turned down the side street and discovered—as he'd expected to, of course—that there was no queue of
peo-ple up before The Aviary.
Barbara was going to be up-set when he didn't show up for dinner on time, but it couldn't be helped.
She'd have trouble keeping the—let’s see, it was Thursday, so it would be braised beef—warm for him.
But he'd been looking for bluebird practically all day, and somehow he hated to go home without one.
Besides, a bluebird might take her mind off what he had to tell her about the application....
Apparently, everybody in the city was looking for bluebirds. All of the bluebird houses produced
within the last few years must have been defective; there was no other way to ac-count for a common
bird spe-cies having become so much in demand virtually overnight.
Well, Melray thought, find-ing bluebirds was like finding anything else. You simply had to know
where to look for them.
He turned into the, sunken entrance of the little shop. There was a big sign on the door. We Do Not
Have Bluebirds, the sign said.


EVEN WITH the anamorphic images of The Smiths crowding into it, the living room seemed
strangely empty, Barbara had scarcely spoken at all since he'd explained to her about the application. A
pecu-liar look had come into her eyes, a sort of glazed, empty look, and she hadn't even seemed to hear
him when he'd told her about the dearth of bluebirds.
She sat now staring at Lit-tle Timmie Smith with a kind of mesmeric fascination. Lit-tle Timmie Smith
was jumping gleefully up and down on the Smith's davenport which ob-truded itself (anamorphically)
right out of the life-size aspect screen and into the living room. He was so close and so real that you
would have felt that you could have reached right out and touched his pink, roly-poly, little boy's body if
you hadn't known before hand that all you would really touch would be thin air.
Mr. Smith was sitting in his big comfortable chair (part of that stuck out of the screen too), discussing
the comfy, trivial matters of everyday living with Mrs. Smith, who sat comfortably on the davenport
(complacently tolerant of Lit-tle Timmie's ecstatic tramp-ling), crocheting antimacassars. "You know,
Mother," Mr. Smith was saying, "this is a petty fine little old world we live in. Whenever people want