"Mel Gilden - Zoot Marlow 2 - Hawaiian UFO Aliens" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gilden Mel)

and surf by proxy with their big, gnarly, party-size robots.
Don't get me wrong. I like Will. He's a smart, smooth guy who's learned how to keep other people's
secrets by practising with his own. He saved my life a couple of times, both metaphorically and literally. I
just don't understand what a guy who seemingly makes his living goofing off does on his vacation.
But his friends and I gathered in front of his house to say goodbye, just as if he were an accountant or
something.
Days before, I asked him about his vacation plans and he told me, 'We're going to Hawaii for the
waves, for the pure, unadulterated, unsweetened, island juice.'
Now, we looked at the pod mall across Pacific Coast Highway while we made small talk to fill in the
time before the shuttle came. Small talk made a nice change from saying goodbye again.
The shuttle came at last, and Will left for the airport with his girlfriend, Bingo. We waved at Will and
Bingo until waving seemed pointless, and straggled back into the house.
I was now alone with the other people who lived there. Which meant that I was pretty much alone.
Unlike Whipper Will, none of them seemed to have thoughts in particular. But they were all bitchen bros
permanently stoked on each other, brewski, and ripping surf.
Flopsie (or was it Mopsie?), one of the red-headed twins, sat down in one of the permanent
depressions on the lump of couch in the big living room. Mustard took up a position on the floor between
her bare legs and lifted to his lips a small furled umbrella full of a substance that hodads and full hanks
were not meant to know. He and Flopsie passed it up and back, each taking a turn suckling hard on one
end of the umbrella and holding their breaths.
The thick curtains were closed, and the only illumination in the room came from the TV set. On it,
healthy boys and girls were slamma-jamming in top-to-bottom tubes that were too fresh to be true. They
were surfing. It was good surf, but that's all they were doing. I guess the novelty was that the surfers were
real people, not robots. You didn't see much of that these days.
These days, a surfer's idea of a personal mano-a-mano type confrontation with the waves was to
send out a big, waterproof robot that he could control from a remote box while standing on the beach.
Most surfers never even got wet. It was as dangerous as checkers and took all the skill of a reasonably
good taxicab driver.
Flopsie and Mustard watched the movie with the intense concentration of brain surgeons who were
twiddling a ganglia with a knife.
Nobody else was in there, just a lot of pillows with grey spots where many heads had rested, surfing
posters on the walls among seashells, blowfish and fishnets, newspapers from the last three weeks, plates
encrusted with food so old and dry it didn't even smell any more, not even if you were sniffing with my
relatively large, Toomler-size schnoz.
I was leaving pretty soon, too, but there were a few things I had to do before I took off. I went into
the bedroom Whipper Will shared with Bingo, and found Bill standing in the back corner in front of Will's
Rotwang 5000 personal computer. I was familiar enough with the house that I barely noticed the heavy
smell of linen that had been too long without benefit of soap and water.
'Bill?' I said.
He didn't answer. Which was strange because he was a robot and programmed to pay attention. I
tried again, with the same result. Small bits flashed and passed on the computer screen, like tiny green
fish.
I crossed the room, avoiding the piles of clothing, camping equipment and junk that I still couldn't
identify, even after months on Earth, and stood at Bill's left shoulder. A cable snaked from Bill's shiny,
duck-shaped body and plugged into the back of the terminal. That's why he was even more engrossed
than the two in the living room.
A game was in progress on the screen, but the playing pieces moved too fast for me to follow. The
game was over in less than a minute, and without pause another began. I pushed the ESCAPE key and
waited. The screen went blank and Bill looked up at me as if he'd been asleep. I am not a big guy
compared to an Earthperson, and Bill would barely come up to my belly button, if I had one.