"Boris and Arkady Strugatsky. The snail on the slope" - читать интересную книгу автора

hand in our work after all, Pepper. I've had a very careful eye on you for a
very long time. . . . There you are then. I've noted your name down for next
week!"
Pepper unplugged the Mercedes.
"I won't be here next week. My visa has expired and
I'm going tomorrow."
"Well, we'll fix that somehow. I'll go to the director, he's a club
member himself, he'll understand. You can reckon to stay another week."
"No," said Pepper. "That won't be necessary." "Oh, yes it will!" said
Proconsul, looking him straight in the eye. "You know perfectly well it is,
Pepper! Good day."
He brought two fingers to his temple and made off, waving his
briefcase.
"It's like a spider's web!" said Pepper. "Am I a fly to them or what?
The manager doesn't want me to leave, Alevtina doesn't and now this one.
..."
"I don't want you to leave either," said Kim.
"But I can't stand it here anymore!" "Seven hundred and eighty-seven,
multiply by four hundred and thirty-two. ..."
"I'll leave all the same," thought Pepper, depressing the keys. "I'll
leave anyway. You may not want it but I will. I shan't be playing ping-pong
with you, or playing chess, or sleeping with you, or drinking tea with jam.
I don't want to sing you any more songs or calculate for you on the
Mercedes, sort out your arguments for you or now read you lectures you won't
understand anyway. And I'm not going to think for you, either. Think for
yourselves, and I'm leaving. Leaving. Leaving. You'll never understand that
thinking isn't a pastime, it's a duty. . . ."
Outside, beyond the incomplete wall, a piledriver thumped heavily,
pneumatic hammers knocked, bricks spilled with a roar. Four workmen in
forage caps were sitting side by side, stripped to the waist and smoking. As
a finishing stroke, a motorcycle roared into life under his window and
ticked over noisily.
"Somebody from the forest," said Kim. "Better multiply me sixteen by
sixteen."
The door burst open and a man ran into the room. He had on a
boiler-suit and an unbuttoned hood dangled on his chest from a length of
radio flex. From boots to waist the boiler-suit bristled with the pale-pink
arrows of young shoots while the right leg was entwined with an orange
plaited liana of endless length and which trailed along the floor. The liana
was still twitching a bit and it seemed to Pepper a very tentacle of the
forest, which would reach out at any moment and drag the man back--through
the corridors of the Directorate down the staircase, along the yard wall,
past the canteen and the workshops, then down the dusty road, through the
park, past the statues and pavilions, up to the entrance to the Serpentine,
to the gates, but not into them, past them to the precipice, and down. . . .
He was wearing motorcycle goggles, and with his face thickly powdered
with dust, Pepper did not at once recognize Stoyan Stoyanov from the
biostation.
He was holding a large paper bag. He made several steps on the tiled
floor with its mosaic picturing a woman taking a shower, and halted in front