"Haldeman, Joe - Seven and the Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

Lydia had charmed him with herself and with a magnificent dinner of duck a l'orange, the cooking of which masked Seven's citric effluvium. After dessert she took out the blue tube and for the first time mentioned the reason for Crane's presence.
"Lazlo, there's someone we'd like you to talk to. About the paper you wrote."
To Seven's credit, he went around the long way, so as not to sneak up from behind. As he walked across the great room to where we were sitting, I watched Lazlo carefully. He didn't freak or faint or even go bug-eyed or stammer. Both eyebrows went up a bit, true, and he blinked. Then he looked at the blue tube and at me. "It's not really a story, then," he said.
"No. It's all true."
He nodded. "I didn't think you wrote that sort of thing.Ф
They talked for a couple of hours, Lazlo questioning Seven closely about the range of his machine, duration of voyages, the sensations he felt, and so forth. Seven showed some fantastic pictures of the places he'd been, like home movies but with three dimensions and smell.
Then Lydia and I opened the garage door and checked to make sure the coast was clear, and the two of them took off for a joyride in the black machine, which was silent and nearly invisible. They came back ninety minutes later, having been around the moon.
When we asked whether he could fix it, Lazlo said he wasn't sure. "It's not so much like a blacksmith trying to fix a car. More like an auto mechanic trying to repair an atom bomb, having read a couple of popular science articles. We need sort of a back-yard Manhattan Project: people, secrecy, money, influence ..."
"You get the people," Lydia said. "Leave the rest to me."
"Wait," I said. "What about safety? I thought Seven said that thing could pull a planet apart."
"Maybe it could," Lazlo admitted. "That's why we'll be doing the blacksmith part on the moon."
Lydia had quite a bit of money, but not enough to swing a project of this magnitude. That's how Seven and the Stars was born.
Seven had home movies of 115 alien worlds. If we set up his projector inside a room with white walls and a white floor, it was just like absolute reality. All I had to do was go into the room with a gas mask and a good half-inch color tape machine, and we had instant documentary. Seven rambled on about the places into a tape recorder, and I rewrote his monologue into a sort of cross between National Geographic specials and the venerable Mork & MindyЧtongue-in-cheek science fiction, with special effects that no one in the industry could match.
We paid union dues for a platoon of nonexistent animators and special-effects people, made a package of thirteen shows, and showed them to all five networks. The bidding was furious. CBS won, and they ran Seven and the Stars right after Ninety Minutes Sunday eveningЧand within four weeks we were outdrawing our lead-in, our commercials getting the highest prices in the industry.
We were a real mystery. Our corporation owned an ex-dude ranch in Nevada, with security to match the sophistication of our supposed special effects. That was where Lazlo and his gang were, of course, when they weren't riding Seven's bowling ball to the moon.
Seven himself was a slight problem. He had a great natural delivery for my lines, but he got sophisticated, started mugging for laughs. I had to tone him down. There's nothing very funny about a cross between Jack Benny and a gila monster.
In a way, it's a race against time. We've done not quite half of Seven's worlds: when we run out, the series is over. But it looks as if we are going to make it. Lazlo's people have gotten to the point where they can open the gray box and poke around with the whatzis inside. I keep looking up into the sky to see if the moon's still there.
I'll hate to see it end. Right now I have the reputation of having produced the most imaginative science fiction everЧfrom the Thought-Eaters of Prrn to the Sensuous Siblings of Sirius VIЧand sooner or later the whole world will know that it wasn't fiction at all.
So I'll have to return all the Hugos and Nebulas and stumble back into obscurity, with nothing to comfort me but a brilliant and beautiful wifeЧand the largest residuals in the history of television. Nobody ever said a writer's life was easy.