"Adams, Douglas - Dirk Gently 01 - Holistic Detective Agency" - читать интересную книгу автора (Adams Douglas)

So after a hectic week of believing that war was peace, that good
was bad, that the moon was made of blue cheese, and that God needed a
lot of money sent to a certain box number, the Monk started to believe
that thirty-five percent of all tables were hermaphrodites, and then
broke down. The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new
motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus
models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking
Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen
entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously
without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and
at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for
less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model.
That was it. Done.
The faulty Monk was turned out into the desert where it could
believe what it liked, including the idea that it had been hard done
by. It was allowed to keep its horse, since horses were so cheap to
make.
For a number of days and nights, which it variously believed to be
three, forty-three, and five hundred and ninety-eight thousand seven
hundred and three, it roamed the desert, putting its simple Electric
trust in rocks, birds, clouds and a form of non-existent elephant-
asparagus, until at last it fetched up here, on this high rock,
overlooking a valley that was not, despite the deep fervour of the
Monk's belief, pink. Not even a little bit.
Time passed.


[::: CHAPTER 3 ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::]

Time passed.
Susan waited.
The more Susan waited, the more the doorbell didn't ring. Or the
phone. She looked at her watch. She felt that now was about the time
that she could legitimately begin to feel cross. She was cross already,
of course, but that had been in her own time, so to speak. They were
well and truly into his time now, and even allowing for traffic,
mishaps, and general vagueness and dilatoriness, it was now well over
half an hour past the time that he had insisted was the latest time
they could possibly afford to leave, so she'd better be ready.
She tried to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but
didn't believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him,
though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If
nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she'd do it herself. Now
there was an idea.
She threw herself crossly into the armchair and watched the news on
television. The news made her cross. She flipped the remote control and
watched something on another channel for a bit. She didn't know what it
was, but it also made her cross. Perhaps she should phone. She was
damned if she was going to phone. Perhaps if she phoned he would phone
her at the same moment and not be able to get through.