"Clark, Brian - The Man Who Walked On The Ceiling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clark Brian)

mother; that dear, fussing, aggravating nuisance of a parent
who still treated her thirty-five year old offspring as an
adolescent; even when she was not around, there was always
something to prick his romantic bubble.
Now he had three days to change that--and he would use
every precious moment. By the day after tomorrow, or perhaps
even sooner, what he already thought of as his mindtwist,
would be transformed into an ability as much beyond
daydreaming as speech is beyond the grunts of apes.
It was too bad he was so misunderstood, especially by
his mother. When she was in a bad mood (which was often),
she called him lazy. Other times, usually when one of her
garrulous friends was present, she would soften the
criticism to one which labeled her only child as
introspective. Sure, he was no prize. George had been
painfully aware of that fact since his lonely, pimply
adolescence. And his job as assistant manager of a mens
clothing store barely covered expenses, including the modest
rent he paid the old lady. He had never had a steady girl,
although he supposed it would be nice to have such a
relationship--that is, if it did not involve so much time,
money and effort. So beyond the occasional fleeting affair,
usually with someone as colorless as he was, and which more
often than not broke up because of George's lack of interest
rather than from anything else, his happiest moments
remained with his books and the worlds they contained.
He had hundreds of books. Perhaps thousands, counting
those boxed in the basement--he had lost count years ago.
Mostly fantasy and science-fiction, they lined two walls of
his room, floor to ceiling, two deep. They were in no
particular order because he preferred it that way. It was an
adventure in itself, to half close his eyes and wander his
fingers along the paper spines as he imagined each as a door
into a different universe. When he took one, whether it was
a dog-eared copy of something he picked up for a dollar in a
flea market, or a new release he bought only days before, it
made no difference. George would drop into the comfortable
leather of the old chair he had inherited from his father
(who never in his life read anything more significant than
the sports pages), turn on the reading lamp, and shed his
ordinariness like the proverbial frog who turns into a
prince.
Mindtwist had first occurred to George when he read one
of those science fact articles which occasionally make an
unexpected appearance in a usually all-fiction magazine. In
this case, the magazine was a fly-by-night which blossomed
amid a blizzard of advertising, lasted for three issues, and
then faded away when its backers realized they have lost
their lower garments as well as their shirts. But because
the article was written by a physics Ph.D who happened to be