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

'Yes, but I never get tired of it,' Phyllis said. 'No matter how hard I try I still can't find it anything but engrossing, right down to the last miserable inch of film.' She turned to Harv. 'Your lighter.'


Rising from his seat, Eric walked to the lounge of the small ship, seated himself at the table, and picked up the drink list. His throat felt dry; the bickering that went on within the Ackerman clan always made him dully thirsty, as if he were in need of some reassuring fluid ... perhaps, he thought, a substitute for the primordial milk: the Urmilch of life. I deserve my own babyland, too, he thought half in jest. But only half.


To everyone but Virgil Ackerman, the Washington, D.C., of 1935 was a waste of time, since only Virgil remembered the authentic city, the authentic time and place, the environment now so long passed away. In every detail, therefore, Wash-35 consisted of a painstakingly elaborate reconstruction of the specific limited universe of childhood which Virgil had known, constantly refined and improved in matters of authenticity by his antique procurer Ц Kathy Sweetscent Ц without really ever being in a genuine sense changed: it had coagulated, cleaved to the dead past... at least as far as the rest of the clan were concerned. But to Virgil it of course sprouted life. There, he blossomed. He restored his flagging biochemical energy and then returned to the present, to the shared, current world which he eminently understood and manipulated but of which he did not psychologically feel himself a native.


And his vast regressive babyland had caught on: become a fad. On lesser scales other top industrialists and money-boys Ц to speak in a brutal and frank way, war profiteers Ц had made life-size models of their childhood worlds, too; Virgil's now had ceased to be unique. None, of course, matched Virgil's in complexity and sheer authenticity; fakes of antique items, not the actual surviving articles, had been strewn about in vulgar approximations of what had been the authentic reality. But in all fairness, it had to be realized, Eric reflected, no one possessed the money and economic know-how to underwrite this admittedly uniquely expensive and beyond all others Ц imitations all Ц utterly impractical venture. This Ц in the midst of the dreadful war.


But still it was, after all, harmless, in its quaint sort of way. A bit, he reflected, like Bruce Himmel's peculiar activity with his many clanky little carts. It slaughtered no one. And this could hardly be said for the national effort... the jihad against the creatures from Proxima.


On thinking of this, an unpleasant recollection entered his mind.


On Terra at the UN capital city, Cheyenne, Wyoming, in addition to those in POW camps, there existed a herd of captured, defanged reegs, maintained on public exhibition by the Terran military establishment. Citizens could file past and gawk and ponder at length the meaning of these exo-skeletoned beings with six extremities in all, capable of progressing linearly at a great rate on either two or four legs. The reegs had no audible vocal apparatus; they communicated beewise by elaborate, dancelike weavings of their sensory stalks. With Terrans and 'Starmen they employed a mechanical translation box, and through this the gawkers had an opportunity to queston their humbled captives.>


Questions, until recently, had run to a monotonous, baiting uniformity. But now a new interrogation had begun by subtle stages to put in its very ominous appearance Ц ominous at least from the standpoint of the Establishment. In view of this inquiry the exhibit had abruptly terminated, and for an indefinite time. How can we come to a rapprochement? The reegs, oddly, had an answer. It amounted to: live and let live. Expansion by Terrans into the Proxima System would cease; the reegs would not Ц and actually had not in the past Ц invest the Sol System.


But as to Lilistar: The reegs had no answer there because they had developed none for themselves; the 'Starmen had been their enemies for centuries and it was too late for anyone to give or take any advice on this subject. And anyhow 'Star 'advisers' had already managed to take up residence on Terra for the performance of security functions... as if a four-armed, antlike organism six feet high could pass unnoticed on a New York street.


The presence of 'Star advisers, however, easily passed unnoticed; the 'Starmen were phycomycetous mentally, but morphologically they could not be distinguished from Terrans. There was a good reason for this. In Mousterian times a flotilla from Lilistar's Alpha Centaurus Empire had migrated to the Sol System, had colonized Earth and to some extent Mars. A fracas with deadly overtones had broken out between settlers of the two worlds and a long, degenerating war had followed, the upshot of which had been the decline of both subcultures to acute and dreary barbarism. Due to climatic faults the Mars colony had at last died out entirely; the Terran, however, had groped its way up through historical ages and at last back to civilization. Cut off from Alpha by the Lilistar-reeg conflict, the Terran colony had again become planet-wide, elaborated, bountiful, had advanced to the stage of launching first an orbiting satellite, and then an unmanned ship to Luna, and at last a manned ship . .. and was, as chef-d'oeuvre, able once more to contact its system of origin. The surprise, of course, had been vast on both sides.


'Cat got your tongue?' Phyllis Ackerman said to Eric, seating herself beside him in the cramped lounge. She smiled, an effort which transfigured her thin, delicately cut face; she looked, for a moment, appealingly pretty. 'Order me a drink, too. So I can face the world of bolo bats and Jean Harlow and Baron von Richthofen and Joe Louis and Ц what the hell is it?' She searched her memory, eyes squeezed shut. 'I've blocked it out of my mind. Oh yes. Tom Mix. And his Ralston Straight Shooters. With the Wrangler. That wretched Wrangler. And that cereal! And those eternal goddam box tops. You know what we're in for don't you? Another session with Orphan Annie and her li'l decoder badge ... we'll have to listen to ads for Ovaltine and then those numbers read out for us to take down and decode Ц to find out what Annie does on Monday. God.' She bent to reach for her drink, and he could not resist peering with near-professional interest as the top of her dress gave way to show the natural line of her small, articulated pale breasts.


Put by this spectacle in a reasonably good mood, Eric said playfully but cautiously, 'One day we'll jot down the numbers the fake announcer gives over the fake radio, decode them with the Orphan Annie decoder badge, andЧ' The message will say, he thought glumly, Make a separate peace with the reegs. At once.


'I know,' Phyllis said, and thereupon finished for him, '"It's hopeless, Earthmen. Give up now. This is the Monarch of the reegs speaking; looky heah, y'all: I've infiltrated radio station WMAL in Washington, D.C., and I'm going to destroy you."' She somberly drank from her tall stemmed glass. '"And in addition the Ovaltine you've been drinkingЧ"'


'I wasn't going to say precisely that.' But she had come awfully darn close. Nettled, Eric said, 'Like the rest of your family you've got a sense that requires you to interrupt before a non-blooderЧ'


'A what?'


'This is what we call you,' he said grimly. 'You Ackermen.'


'Go ahead then, doctor.' Her gray eyes lit with amusement. 'Say your tiny say.'