"Peter F. Hamilton - The White Stuff" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

THE WHITE STUFF
Peter F Hamilton & Graham Joyce
From the short story compilation New Worlds 1997, edited by David Garnett.

v1.0 by the N.E.R.D's. Scanned, page numbers removed, paragraphs joined, formatted, common OCR
errors have been removed and a full spell check is complete. Full read-through still required.

v1.1 Full read through completed by the N.E.R.D's

Nigel Finchley first blinked into the gleam on his way into the City, where he high-rolled other people's
money on the trading floor. A Nimbus owner himself, he cast an appreciative gaze over the classic Lotus
Esprit swishing up beside him at the traffic lights. Its engine purred with deliberate, sexual rhythm as the
brunette Trust Fund Babe behind the wheel toed the accelerator in provocation.

But when he tried to eye-photo her silhouette, the glare coming off the Esprit's ice-blue paintwork
defeated him. Squinting to filter out the reflected sunlight he realized just how mirror-bright that polish
was. The Esprit had a sunbeam corona all of its own, making the rest of the queuing cars dull, mundane.
Money, he told himself, money lays that kind of gleam on everything it touches.

The Esprit surged forward in a burst of arrogant power.

Nigel watched it go, thoughts contaminated by low-level resentment. Later he saw the gleam again. A
Piccolo this time. Nothing wrong with Piccolos; MG versions were decent sporty runabouts. But they
shouldn't gleam, not like that. He watched it pass. The Piccolo went gliding down the street with
unnatural elegance.

His curiosity was roused. Almost unconsciously he began searching the traffic for more, and spotted
another three examples before he swung down into the company's underground car park. Five
extraordinarily gleaming cars out of a near-gridlocked city.

***

Nigel's regular lunchtime pub was The Swan, perched alongside a canal restored by a government
benefit-earn scheme. Smartened up beyond the pocket of its original water-traffic clientele, serving a
nouveau cuisine menu, it had achieved a reputation equal to any of the area's contemporary wine bars,
sucking in a whole strata of City financiers, the players of digital money. It had a whitewashed facade
with a frieze of iron-rimmed cartwheels bolted onto the brick, and hanging baskets adorning the taproom
door. The landlord served real ale from wooden kegs, and carrot juice from liquidisers with a sound like
a dentist's drill. A large parking lot round the back was bordered by a high redbrick wall. It couldn't be
seen from the street.

Nigel coasted the Nimbus into a spare slot, turned off the ignition, and looked up to see her. Maybe
sixteen years old with freckles and a riot of vivid copper hair in tiny corkscrew curls. Her adolescent
breasts bobbled like half tennis balls under a scoopneck T-shirt; her faded denim microskirt offered him a
grand view of her long, suntanned legs. Bright noonday sun made her hair blaze, halo fashion.

***
She would be one of the kids from the sink estate on the edge of the Capitalcorp's redevelopment
incentive zoneтАФa hell-hole of squatters, dealers, pimps, and exo-European illegalsтАФall trying to make
the same quid washing windscreens. Nigel felt a hot jab of envy. Though he had everything she didn't