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

spiracy theories in the loonier reaches of the American
mass mind.
"It's good," said Kihn, polishing his yellow
Polaroid shooting glasses on the hem of his Hawaiian
shirt, "but it's not mental; lacks the true quill."
But I saw it, Mervyn." We were seated poolside in
brilliant Arizona sunlight. He was in Tucson waiting for
a group of retired Las Vegas civil servants whose leader
received messages from Them on her microwave oven.
I'd driven all night and was feeling it.
"Of course you did. Of course you saw it. You've
read my stuff; haven't you grasped my blanket solution
to the UFO problem? It's simple, plain and country sim-
ple: people" he settled the glasses carefully on his long
hawk nose and fixed me with his best basilisk glare
"see . . . things. People see these things. Nothing's
there, but people see them anyway. Because they need
to, probably. You've read Jung. you should know the
score... .In your case, it's so obvious: You admit you
were thinking about this crackpot architecture, having
fantasies. .. .Look, I'm sure you've taken your share of
drugs, right? How many people survived the Sixties in
California without having the odd hallucination? All
those nights when you discovered that whole armies of
Disney technicians had been employed to weave
animated holograms of Egyptian hieroglyphs into the
fabric of your jeans, say, or the times when "
"But it wasn't like that."
"Of course not. It wasn't like that at all; it was `in a
setting of clear reality,' right? Everything normal, and
then there's the monster, the mandala, the neon cigar.
In your case, a giant Tom Swift airplane. It happens all
the time. You aren't even crazy. You know that, don't
you?" He fished a beer out of the battered foam cooler
beside his deck chair.
"Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I
interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who'd been assaulted
bya bar hade."
``A what?"
"A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar
hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying
saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin
Wayne's vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two
cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up
behind its ears." He burped. -
"It assaulted her? How?"
"You don't want to know; you're obviously im-
pressionable. `It was cold' " he lapsed into his bad
southern accent " `and metallic.' It made electronic
noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods