"Arkadi and Boris Strugatsky. Monday begins on Saturday (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

It would have been good to return home at that point and get into all
those sofa affairs in earnest. To experiment a bit with the shape-shifter
book and have a heart-to-heart talk with Basil the tomcat and poke around
the hen's-legs cottage to see if there were other interesting things in it.
But the car was also waiting there for me, which necessitated both a DC and
a TS. I could put up with DC-- it was only the Daily Care, calling for the
shaking out of floor mats and the washing of the body with a stream of water
under pressure, which washing, incidentally, could, in case of necessity, be
performed by the substitute method of ablution with a watering can or a
pail. But the TS . . . that was a frightening concept for a neat person on a
hot day. Because TS was none other than Technical Service, which technical
service consisted of my lying under the car with the grease gun and
gradually transferring its contents to the grease fittings and equally well
to my person. It's hot and stuffy under a car and its undercarriage is
covered with a thick layer of dried mud. . . . In short, I was not very
anxious to go home.

Chapter 4

Who has permitted himself this diabolical jest?
Seize him, and tear off his mask so that we
may know whom we shall hang this morning
from the castle wall.

E. Poe



I bought a two-day-old Pravda, drank a glass of soda water, and settled
down on a bench in the park, in the shade of the Honor Roll. It was eleven
o'clock. I looked through the paper carefully. This took seven minutes. Then
I read the article about hydroponics, the feature about the doings in Kansk,
and a long letter to the editor from the workers of a chemical plant. This
took altogether twenty-two minutes.

Perhaps I should visit the cinema, I thought. But I had already seen
Kozara, once in the theater and once on television. So I decided to have
something to drink, folded the paper, and stood up. Of all the copper
collection from the old hag, there remained only a single five-kopeck piece.
Finish it up, I decided; had a glass of soda with syrup, got a kopeck back,
and bought a box of matches in the adjoining stall. There was nothing else
to do downtown. So I started off at random-- into a narrow street between
store No. 2 and dining room No. 11.
There were almost no pedestrians. A huge dusty truck with a rattling
trailer passed by. The driver, head and elbow stuck out of the window, was
tiredly scanning the Belgian block pavement. Descending, the street turned
sharply to the right, where the barrel of an ancient cast-iron cannon, frill
of butts and dirt, was stuck in the ground. Soon the street ended at the
cliff by the river. I sat a while on the edge admiring the landscape, then
crossed over to the other side and strolled back to the center of town.