"Radio Free Albemuth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Radio Free Albemuth
GRAFTON BOOKS
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
LONDON GLASGOW TORONTO SYDNEY AUCKLAND

Grafton Books
A Division of the Collins Publishing Group
8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA
A Grafton UK Paperback Original 1987 Copyright (c)The Estate of Philip K. Dick 1985 ISBN 0-586-06936-4
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Collins, Glasgow
Set in Times
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-soid, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

The publisher would like to thank Tim Powers for providing Philip K. Dick's final corrected manuscript of this novel, which Dick had given Powers for his private collection.

Prologue
In 1932 in April a small boy and his mother and father waited on an Oakland, California, pier for the San Francisco ferry. The boy, who was almost four years old, noticed a blind beggar, huge and old with white hair and beard, standing with a tin cup. The little boy asked his father for a nickel, which the boy took over to the beggar and gave him. The beggar, in a surprisingly hearty voice, thanked him and gave him back a piece of paper, which the boy took to his father to see what it was.
'It tells about God,' his father said.
The little boy did not know that the beggar was not actually a beggar but a supernatural entity visiting Earth to check up on people. Years later the little boy grew up and became a man. In the year 1974 that man found himself in terrible difficulties, facing disgrace, imprisonment, and possible death. There was no way for him to extricate himself. At that point the supernatural entity returned to Earth, loaned the man a part of his spirit, and saved him from his difficulties. The man never guessed why the supernatural entity came to rescue him. He had long ago forgotten the great bearded blind beggar and the nickel he had given him.
I speak now of these matters.

PART ONE
Phil

My friend Nicholas Brady, who in his own mind helped
save the world, was born in Chicago in 1928 but then
moved right to California. Most of his life was spent in
the Bay Area, especially in Berkeley. He remembered
the metal hitching posts in the shape of horses' heads in
front of the old houses in the hilly part of the city, and
the electric Red Trains that met the ferries, and, most of
all, the fog. Later, by the forties, the fog had ceased to
lie over Berkeley in the night.
Originally Berkeley, at the time of the Red Trains and
the streetcars, was quiet and underpopulated except for
the University, with its illustrious frat houses and fine
football team. As a child Nicholas Brady took in a few
football games with his father, but he never understood
them. He could not even get the team song right. But he
did like the Berkeley campus with the trees and the quiet
groves and Strawberry Creek; most of all he liked the
sewer pipe through which the creek ran. The sewer pipe
I was the best thing on the campus. In summer, when the
creek was low, he crawled up and down it. One time
some people called him over and asked if he was a college
student. He was eleven years old then.
I asked him once why he chose to live his life out in Berkeley, which by the forties had become overcrowded, noisy, and afflicted by angry students who fought it out at the Co-op market as if the stacks of canned food were barricades.
'Shit, Phil,' Nicholas Brady said. 'Berkeley is my home.' People who gravitated to Berkeley believed that, even if they had only been there a week. They claimed no other place existed. This became particularly true when the coffeehouses opened up on Telegraph Avenue and the free speech movement started. One time Nicholas was standing in line at the Co-op on Grove and saw Mario Savio in line ahead of him. Savio was smiling and waving at admirers. Nicholas was on campus the day the PHUQUE sign was held up in the cafeteria, and the cops busted the guys holding it. However, he was in the bookstore, browsing, and missed the whole thing.
Although he lived in Berkeley for ever and ever, Nicholas attended the University for only two months, which made him different from everyone else. The others attended the University in perpetuity. Berkeley had an entire population of professional students who never graduated and who had no other goal in life. Nicholas's nemesis vis-a-vis the University was ROTC, which in his time was still going strong. As a child Nicholas had gone to a progressive or Communist-front nursery school. His mother, who had many friends in the Communist Party in Berkeley in the thirties, sent him there. Later he became a Quaker, and he and his mother sat around in Friends Meeting the way Quakers do, waiting for the Holy Spirit to move them to speak. Nicholas subsequently forgot all that, at least until he enrolled at Cal and found himself given an officer's uniform and an M-l rifle. Thereupon his unconscious fought back, burdened by old memories; he damaged the gun and could not go through the manual of arms; he came to drill out of uniform; he got failing grades; he was informed that failing grades in