The Coming of the Quantum Cats (Frederik Pohl) читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги (ч. 23)

At the age of seventy-three, Timothy McGarren had been doorman at Lakeshore Towers since the day it opened its doors and he turned in his retirement papers to the Metropolitan Transport Authority. They were the same day, and both were ten years in the past. He had made the trip from curbside to elevator so many times that he could do it in his sleep, or walking backward. Sometimes, like now, holding the doors for Mrs. Spiegelfrom 26—A, he actually did do it backward, feeling with his foot for the bottom step. Only there didn't seem to be one. He overbalanced, grabbed for the railing, missed, and dropped into thirty feet of water, with the lights of the Chicago skyline blinking at him over a hundred yards of Lake Michigan water.