"Attanasio, A A - Radix 02 - In Other Worlds 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Attanasio A.A)

to see the mess themselves, and they found Zee still there.
"What do you think happened?" Caitlin asked after she had
surveyed a blasted room.
Zee was sittin on the couch in the living area where he could
see to the bathroom, staring as though he had not heard h r. He
tugged at his beard, twisting at the braid that had formed from his
daylong tugging. "Spontaneous human combustion," he whispered
without looking at her.
"What?" The old woman looked to her daughter, who just
shook her tear-streaked face.
"No one knows why," Zee answered in a trance, "but it
happens all the time-usually to old ladies who drink too much."
Caitlin gave him a fierce, reproving look.
"I'm not joking," he shot back. ."That's the statistic. Men burn
up, too. And I guess that's what's happened to Carl."
"You mean, he just caught fire?" Caitlin sat down beside him
and peered into his face incredulously. "How can that be?"
"I don't know. Nobody, knows. I read about it once. The best
theory they have is that imbibed alcohol ignites some kind of
chemical reaction in the body."
"But Carl never drinks," Sheelagh pointed out, and then
straightened with the rise of a memory. "The police came by the
tavern. I told them he was feeling odd yesterday. Paper stuck to him
and sparks kept jumping from his. fingers."
"Yeah, I remember that," Zee muttered. He stood up. He
went back to the bathroom for another look at the mystery. He
was a rational man, and he felt, muscularly felt, that there was a
reason for this.
The blue, wide-sky fragrance was almost gone. Sunlight
slanted through the apartment window and
laid a diagonal bar across the purpled bathroom mirror. In the
brilliant yellow shaft, a shadow showed within the heat-varnish of
the mirror.
"Hey!" he called to the two women. "Do you see this? Or am
I losing my mind?"
Caitlin and Sheelagh entered the bathroom with trepid
alertness and peered where Zee was pointing. In the violet-black
sheen of the mirror, where the sunlight crawled, was the vaguest
shadow.
"It looks like a tree crown to me," Caitlin said.
"No-it's the outline of a head, neck, and shoulders," Zee
insisted, his finger frantically outlining the image.
"Could be," Sheelagh conceded. "But it could also just be our
imagination."
"I'm a science writer," Zee said impatiently, pressing his face
to the mirror. "I don't have an imagination. Get me a screwdriver.
Come on."
Zee dismantled the mirror and took it to his studio office in
Union Square. For a while he experimented with it himself,
illuminating the surface with sunlight, arc light, UV light. Nothing