"Dick, Philip K - Now Wait for Last Year v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

'That no nevermind, Mr Ackerman,' Steve assured him. 'Georgie, he earn he sled; he not want tips but real and troo pay.' The dignified dark robant moved off then and was gone.


'Damn convincing,' Harv said presently.


'Really is.' Jonas agreed. He shivered. 'God, to think that the actual man's been dead a century. It's distinctly hard to keep in mind we're on Mars, not even on Earth in our own time Ц I don't like it. I like things to appear what they really are.'


A thought came to Eric. 'Do you object to a stereo tape of a symphony played back in the evening when you're at home in your apt?'


'No,' Jonas said, 'but that's totally different.'


'It's not,' Eric disagreed. 'The orchestra isn't there, the original sound has departed, the hall in which it was recorded is now silent; all you possess is twelve hundred feet of iron oxide tape that's been magnetized in a specific pattern ... it's an illusion just like this. Only this is complete.' Q.E.D., he thought, and walked on then, toward the stairs. We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a 'fake' as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there's nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment Ц the present Ц has little meaning, if any.


Maybe, he pondered as he ascended the stairs, that's my problem with Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other. .. now it's become an involuntary arrangement, derived God knows how far from the past.


And neither of us understands it. Neither of us can puzzle out its meaning or its motivating mechanism. With a better memory we could turn it back into something we could fathom.


He thought, Maybe this is the first sign of old age making its dread appearance. And for me at thirty-four!


Phyllis, halting on the stair, waiting for him, said, 'Have an affair with me doctor.'


Inwardly he quailed, felt hot, felt terror, felt excitement, felt hope, felt hopelessness, felt guilt, felt eagerness.


He said, 'You have the most perfect teeth known to man.'


'Answer.'


'IЧ' He tried to think of an answer. Could words respond to this? But this had come in the form of words, had it not? 'And be roasted into a cinder by Kathy Ц who sees everything that goes on?' He felt the woman staring at him, staring and staring with her huge, star-fixed eyes. 'Hmm,' he said, not too cleverly, and felt miserable and small and exactly precisely right to the last jot and tittle what he ought not to be.


Phyllis said, 'But you need it.'


'Umm,' he said, wilting under this unwanted, undeserved female psychiatric examination of his evil, inner soul; she had it Ц his soul Ц and she was turning it over and over on her tongue. Goddam her! She had figured it out; she spoke the truth; he hated her; he longed to go to bed with her. And of course she knew Ц saw on his face Ц all this, saw it with her accursed huge eyes, eyes which no mortal woman ought to possess.