"Burning Chrome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gibson Walter)

wholesalers, and small used-car lots. I went for the gas
stations in a big way.
During the high point of the Downes Age, they put
Ming the Merciless in charge of designing California gas
stations. Favoring the architecture of his native Mongo,
he cruised up and down the coast erecting raygun
emplacements in white stucco. Lots of them featured
superfluous central towers ringed with those strange
radiator flanges that were a signature motif of the style,
and made them look as though they might generate po-
tent bursts of raw technological enthusiasm, if you
could only find the switch that turned them on. I shot
one in San Jose an hour before the bulldozers arrived
and drove right through the structural truth of plaster
and lathing and cheap concrete.
"Think of it," Dialta Downes had said, "as a kind
of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An
architecture of broken dreams."
And that was my frame of mind as I made the sta-
tions of her convoluted socioarchitectural cross in my
red Toyota as I gradually tuned in to her image of a
shadowy America-that-wasn't, of Coca-Cola plants like
beached submarines, and fifth-run movie houses like
the temples of some lost sect that had worshiped blue
mirrors and geometry. And as I moved among these
secret ruins, I found myself wondering what the in-
habitants of that lost future would think of the world I
lived in. The Thirties dreamed white marble and slip-
stream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze,
but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps
had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming.
After the war, everyone had a car no wings for it and
the promised superhighway to drive it down, so that the
sky itself darkened, and the fumes ate the marble and
pitted the miracle crystal. . .
And one day, on the outskirts of Bolinas, when I
was setting up to shoot a particularly lavish example of
Ming's martial architecture, I penetrated a fine mem-
brane, a membrane of probability...
Every so gently, I went over the Edge
And looked up to see a twelve-engined thing like a
bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east
with an elephantine grace, so low that I could count the
rivets in its dull silver skin, and hear maybe the echo
of jazz.

I took it to Kihn.
Merv Kihn, free-lance journalist with an extensive
line in Texas pterodactyls, redneck UFO contactees,
bush-league Loch Ness monsters, and the Top Ten con-