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

from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a
witch. There's just no place for her to function in this
society. She'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been
brought up on `The Bionic Man' and all those `Star
Trek' reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she
knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes
before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the
polygraph."
I must have looked pained, because he set his beer
down carefully beside the cooler and sat up.
"If you want a classier explanation, I'd say you
saw a semiotic ghost. All these contactee stories, for in-
stance, are framed in a kind of sci-fi imagery that
permeates our culture. I could buy aliens, but not aliens
that look like Fifties' comic art. They're semiotic phan-
toms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off
and taken on a life of their own, like the Jules Verne air-
ships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.
But you saw a different kind of ghost, that's all. That
plane was part of the mass unconscious, once. You
picked up on that, somehow. The important thing is not
to worry about it."
I did worry about it, though.
Kihn combed his thinning blond hair and went off
to hear what They had had to say over the radar range
lately, and I drew the curtains in my room and lay down
in air-conditioned darkness to worry about it. I was still
worrying about it when I woke up. Kihn had left a note
on my door; he was flying up north in a chartered plane
to check out a cattle-mutilation rumor ("muties," he
called them; another of his journalistic specialties).
I had a meal, showered, took a crumbling diet pill
that had been kicking around in the bottom of my shav-
ing kit for three years, and headed back to Los Angeles.
The speed limited my vision to the tunnel of the
Toyota's headlights. The body could drive, I told
myself, while the mind maintained. Maintained and
stayed away from the weird peripheral window dressing
of amphetamine and exhaustion, the spectral, luminous
vegetation that grows out of the corners of the mind's
eye along late-night highways. But the mind had its own
ideas, and Kihn's opinion of what I was already think-
ing of as my "sighting" rattled endlessly through my
head in a tight, lopsided orbit. Semiotic ghosts.
Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind
of my passage. Somehow this feedback-loop aggravated
the diet pill, and the speed-vegetation along the road
began to assume the colors of infrared satellite images,
glowing shreds blown apart in the Toyota's slipstream.
I pulled over, then, and a half-dozen aluminum