"Dick, Philip K - Martian Time Slip v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

"Got 'em on, sir. Thank you, sir."
They tied his hands with gauze to the sides of the bed because he tried to pull out the catheter. He lay facing the window, seeing through the dusty, cracked glass.
Outside, a bug on tall legs picked through the heaps. It ate, and then something squashed it and went on, leaving it squashed with its dead teeth sunk into what it had wanted to eat. Finally its dead teeth got up and crawled out of its mouth in different directions.
He lay there for a hundred and twenty-three years and then his artificial liver gave out and he fainted and died. By that time they had removed both his arms and legs up to the pelvis because those parts of him had decayed.
He didn't use them anyhow. And without arms he didn't try to pull the catheter out, and that pleased them.
I been at AM-WEB for a long time, he said. Maybe you can get me a transistor radio so I can tune in Friendly Fred's Breakfast Club; I like to hear the tunes, they play a lot of the old-time favorites.
Something outside gives me hay fever. Must be those yellow flowering weeds, why do they let them get so tall?
I once saw a ballgame.
For two days he lay on the floor, in a big puddle, and then the landlady found him and called for the truck to bring him here. He snored all the way, it woke him up. When they tried to give him grapefruit juice he could only work one arm, the other never worked again ever. He wished he could still make those leather belts, they were fun and took lots of time. Sometimes he sold them to people who came by on the weekend.
"Do you know who I am, Manfred?"
"No."
"I'm Arnie Kott. Why don't you laugh or smile sometimes, Manfred? Don't you like to run around and play?"
As he spoke Mr. Kott gubbled from both his eyes.
"Obviously he doesn't, Arnie, but that's not what concerns us here anyhow."
"What do you see, Manfred? Let us in on what you see. All those people, are they going to live there, is that it? Is that right, Manfred? Can you see lots of people living there?"
He put his hands over his face, and the gubble stopped.
"I don't see why this kid never laughs."
Gubble, gubble.




10


Inside Mr. Kott's skin were dead bones, shiny and wet. Mr. Kott was a sack of bones, dirty and yet shiny-wet. His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them; inside him the greens became rotten things as something ate them to make them dead.
He could see everything that went on inside Mr. Kott, the teeming gubbish life. Meanwhile, the outside said, "I love Mozart. I'll put this tape on." The box read: "Symphony 40 in G mol., K. 550." Mr. Kott fiddled with the knobs of the amplifier. "Bruno Walter conducting," Mr. Kott told his guests. "A great rarity from the golden age of recordings."
A hideous racket of screeches and shrieks issued from the speakers, like the convulsions of corpses. Mr. Kott shut off the tape transport.
"Sorry," he muttered. It was an old coded message, from Rockingham or Scott Temple or Anne, from someone, anyhow; Mr. Kott, he knew that. He knew that by accident it had found its way into his library of music.
Sipping her drink, Doreen Anderton said, "What a shock. You should spare us, Arnie. Your sense of humor--"
"An accident," Arnie Kott said angrily. He rummaged for another tape. Aw, the hell with it, he thought. "Listen, Jack," he said, turning. "I'm sorry to make you come here when I know your dad's visiting, but I'm running out of time; show me your progress with the Steiner boy, O.K.?" His anticipation and concern made him stutter. He looked at Jack expectantly.
But Jack Bohlen hadn't heard him; he was saying something to Doreen there on the couch where the two of them sat together.
"We're out of booze," Jack said, setting down his empty glass.
"God sake," Arnie said, "I got to hear how you've done, Jack. Can't you give me anything? Are you two just going to sit there necking and whispering? I don't feel good." He went unsteadily into the kitchen, where Heliogabalus sat on a tall stool, like a dunce, reading a magazine. "Fix me a glass of warm water and baking soda," Arnie said.
"Yes, Mister." Heliogabalus closed his magazine and stepped down from the stool. "I overheard. Why don't you send them out? They are no good, no good at all, Mister." From the cabinet over the sink he took the package of bicarbonate of soda; he spooned out a teaspoonful.
"Who cares about your opinion?" Arnie said.
Doreen entered the kitchen, her face drawn and tired. "Arnie, I think I'll go home. I really can't take much of Manfred; he never stops moving around, never sits still. I can't stand it." Going up to Arnie she kissed him on the ear. "Goodnight, dear."
"I read about a kid who thought he was a machine," Arnie said. "He had to be plugged in, he said, to work. I mean, you have to be able to stand these fruits. Don't go. Stay for my sake. Manfred's a lot quieter when a woman's around. I don't know why. I have the feeling that Bohlen's accomplished nothing; I'm going out there and tell him to his face." A glass of warm water and baking soda was put into his right hand by his tame Bleekman. "Thanks." He drank it gratefully.
"Jack Bohlen," Doreen said, "has done a fine job under difficult conditions. I don't want to hear anything said against him." She swayed slightly, smiling. "I'm a little drunk."
"Who isn't?" Arnie said. He put his arm around her waist and hugged her. "I'm so drunk I'm sick. O.K., that kid gets me, too. Look, I put on that old coded tape; I must be nuts." Setting down his glass he unbuttoned the top buttons of her blouse. "Look away, Helio. Read your book." The Bleekman looked away. Holding Doreen against him, Arnie unbuttoned all the buttons of her blouse and began on her skirt. "I know they're ahead of me, those Earth bastards coming in everywhere you look. My man at the terminal can't even count them any more; they been coming in all day long. Let's go to bed." He kissed her on the collar bone, nuzzled lower and lower until she raised his head with the strength of her hands.
In the living room, his hotshot repairman hired away from Mr. Yee fiddled with the tape recorder, clumsily putting on a fresh reel. He had knocked over his empty glass.
What happens if they get there before me? Arnie Kott asked himself as he clung to Doreen, wheeling slowly about the kitchen with her as Heliogabalus read to himself. What if I can't buy in at all? Might as well be dead. He bent Doreen backwards, but all the time thinking, There has to be a place for me. I love this planet.
Music blared; Jack Bohlen had gotten the tape going.
Doreen pinched him savagely, and he let go of her; he walked from the kitchen, back into the living room, turned down the volume, and said, "Jack, let's get down to business."
"Right," Jack Bohlen agreed.
Coming from the kitchen after him, buttoning her blouse, Doreen made a wide circuit to avoid Manfred, who was down on his hands and knees; the boy had spread out a length of butcher paper and was pasting bits cut from magazines onto it with library paste. Patches of white showed on the rug where he had slopped.
Going up to the boy, Arnie bent down close to him and said, "Do you know who I am, Manfred?"
There was no answer from the boy, nothing to show he had even heard.
"I'm Arnie Kott," Arnie said. "Why don't you laugh or smile sometimes, Manfred? Don't you like to run around and play?" He felt sorry for the boy, sorry and distressed.
Jack Bohlen said in an unsteady, thick voice, "Obviously he doesn't, Arnie, but that's not what concerns us here, anyhow." His gaze was befuddled; the hand that held the glass shook.