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

day's cooking chores.
Carl was pleased that Caitlin encouraged his passion for
Sheelagh, believing that the old woman was only teasing his interest
in her daughter to keep him happy and hopeful. Carl's loneliness was
the only lack Caitlin could pretend to complete in return for all he
had done for* them. Besides, Sheelagh was too self-willed for her
mother's opinions to influence her even if the crone had really
thought he was right for her. Carl spent little time pondering it that
last day lie lived as a man, for he was kept busy with his own
strangeness.

Lightbulbs blinked out around him faster than he could replace
them. And as he worked the bar for the afternoon business lunches,
the reverie he had experienced that morning spaced out and
became moony and distracted.
"You look pretty harried, sucker," a friendly, gravelly voice
said as the blender he was trying to run for a banana daiquiri
sputtered and stalled. He looked up into the swart-bearded face of
Zeke Zhdarnov, his oldest friend. Zee was a free-lance science
writer and parttime instructor of chemistry at NYU. He was a
thickset man with a penchant for glenurquhart plaid suits and
meerschaum pipes. Carl and Zee had been friends since their
adolescence in a boys' home in Newark, New Jersey. They had
nothing in common.
At St. Timothy's Boys' Home, Zee had been a husky, athletic
ruffian and Carl a chubby, spectacled math demon. A mutual love
for comic books brought them together and defied their differences.
St. Tim's was a state house, and the place was haunted with
dispirited, vicious youths-from criminal homes. Zee offered
protection from the roughs, and Carl did his best to carry Zee's
classwork. At eighteen, Zee graduated to the Marines and Nam.
Carl sought personal freedom by applying his math skills to finance
at Rutgers University. A Manhattan brokerage drafted him straight
out of the dorms. Meanwhile in Nam, Zee was learning all there
was to know about the smallness of life. He paid for that education
cheaply with the patella of his right knee, and he came back
determined to invent a new life for himself. He studied science,
wanting to understand something of the technology that had
become his kennel. When that became too abstract, he went to
work for a New Jersey drug company and married, wanting to find
a feeling equal to the numbness that surrounded him. During his
divorce, he had sought
out Carl, and the pain and rectification of that time had
brought them together again, closer than they had ever
been. Carl had done poorly at the brokerage, stultified
by the anomie that had poisoned him from childhood
but only oozed out- of him after he had found enough
security to stop his mad scramble from St. Tim's and
catch the scent of himself. He had smelled sour, and
not until he had met Sheelagh and developed the Blue