"Edward L. Ferman - Best From F&SF, 23rd Edition" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ferman Edward L)

read the letter as a secretary typed it. The agent followed his instruction to mail his reply in an envelope
without return address. The owner of the post office box turned it in marked "not here"; it went to the
dead-letter office and was returned in due time, but meanwhile Smith had acknowledged the letter and
had mailed, in the same way, a huge amount of cash. In subsequent letters he instructed the agent to take
bids for components, plans for which he enclosed, from electronics manufacturers, for plastic casings
from another, and for assembly and shipping from still another company. Through a second commission
agent in New York, to whom he wrote hi the same way, he contracted for ten thousand copies of an
instruction booklet in four colors.
Late in February he bought a house and an electronics dealership in a small town in the Adirondacks.
In March he signed over his interest in the company to his partner, cleaned out his lab and left He Bold
his co-op apartment in Manhattan and his summer house in Connecticut, moved to his new home and
became anonymous.
You are thirteen, chasing a fox with the big kids for the first time. They have put you in the north field,
the worst place, but you know better than to leave it
"He's in the glen."
"I see him; he's in the brook, going upstream."
You turn the viewer, racing forward through dappled shade, a brilliance of leaves: there is the glen,
and now you see the fox, trotting through the shallows, blossoms of bright water at its feet.
"Ken and Nell, you come down ahead of him by the springhouse. Wanda, you and Tim and Jean
stay where you are. Everybody else come upstream, but stay back till I tell you."
That's Leigh, the oldest. You turn the viewer, catch a glimpse of Bobby running downhill through the
woods, his long hair flying. Then back to the glen: the fox is gone.
"He's heading up past the corncrib!"
"Okay, keep spread out on both sides, everybody. Jim, can you and Edie head him off before he
gets to the woods?"
"Well try. There he is!"
And the chase is going away from you, as you knew it would, but soon you will be older, as old as
Nell and Jim; then you will be in the middle of things, and your life will begin.
By trial and error, Smith has found the settings for Dallas, November 22, 1963: Dealey Plaza, 12:25
P.M. He sees the Presidential motorcade making the turn onto Elm Street. Kennedy slumps forward,
raising his hands to his throat. Smith presses a button to hold the moment in tune. He scans behind the
motorcade, finds the sixth floor of the Book Depository Building, finds the window. There is no one
behind the barricade of cartons; the room is empty. He scans the nearby rooms, finds nothing. He tries
the floor below. At an open window a man kneels, holding a high-powered rifle. Smith photographs him.
He returns to the motorcade, watches as the second shot strikes the President. He freezes time again,
scans the surrounding buildings, finds a second marksman on a roof, photographs him. Back to the
motorcade. A third and fourth shot, the last blowing off the side of the President's head. Smith freezes the
action again, finds two gunmen on the grassy knoll, one aiming across the top of a station wagon, one
kneeling in the shrubbery. He photographs them. He turns off the power,, sits for a moment, then goes to
the washroom, kneels beside the toilet and vomits.
The viewer is your babysitter, your television, your telephone (the telephone lines are still up, but they
are used only as signaling devices; when yon know that somebody wants to talk to you, you focus your
viewer on him), your library, your school. Before puberty you watch other people having sex, but even
then your curiosity is easily satisfied; after an older cousin initiates you at fourteen, you are much more
interested in doing it yourself. The co-op teacher monitors your studies, sometimes makes suggestions,
but more and more, as you grow older, leaves you to your own devices. You are intensely interested in
African prehistory, in the European theater, and in the ant-civilization of Epsilon Eridani IV. Soon you will
have to choose.
New York Harbor, November 4, 1872тАФa cold, blustery day. A two-masted ship rides at anchor;
on her stern is lettered: Mary Celeste. Smith advances the time control. A flicker of darkness, light again,