"James Patrick Kelly - Ninety Percent of Everything" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

 "I've been to all five sites."
I whistled. "Even Gobi?"
"I spent an hour last month hovering over Gobi B, close enough to touch
the cluster. It has a red..." He shut his eyes and his face softened with
pleasure. I've seen men look that way after sex or just before cutting into
filet mignon and once in front of the Botticelli frescos at the Louvre, but
never remembering a rhombohedron. "They're the most exquisite things I've ever
seen," said Ramsdel Wetherall.
Well, at least he was right about that. Then I got suspicious. "Wait a
minute. A whole hour? This doesn't have anything to do with Cosmic Lighthouse
Keepers?"
He crumpled his ice cream wrapper and tossed it at the trash can on the
other side of the van. It missed. "You don't believe that the jewels might be
windows to other realities and the piles are their batteries?"
"Oh, it's windows and batteries now?" I said. "Last summer Thorp was
claiming they were some kind of beacons. Look, a theory explains observations,
Mr. Wetherall. Did you observe another reality?"
"Not yet." He gave me a dreamy stare. "My friends call me Wetherall."
****
Everyone had heard of the unfortunate Dr. Blaine Thorp who, after
inadvertently getting a smudge of shitdog casting on his right hand, was
driven by the smell to perform the self-amputation that almost killed him.
Most people assumed that this famous accident occurred during the course of
some kind of scientific experiment, a misapprehension which Thorp was happy to
encourage. In fact _Doctor_ Thorp's only advanced degree was from the Palmer
College of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa. He was a hobbyist and a crackpot
and possibly the worst thing to happen to exobiology since the shitdogs ate
their landers. Nevertheless he relentlessly promoted himself as the Ahab of
the shitdogs, a man whose unique intimacy with these mysterious creatures had
somehow given him true insight into their nature. Or should I say insights;
his theories about the shitdogs were as variable as the weather. He announced
that the shitdogs do their math in base five. He discerned linguistic
symbolism in the paths of their tunneling through the salt flats. He claimed
he could tell their emotional state from the color of their castings. And the
jewels ... they were either talismans of alien enlightenment or religious
icons of an interstellar coprophagology cult or sculptures designed to
transform human perception or, as of last Thursday, or whenever Wetherall had
spoken to Thorp, windows to other realities.
****
"If you're in this with Thorp, you'd better just pull over and let me out
right here," I said. "He's a fake."
"He didn't fake his accident. I shook his hook when we met."
"I'll grant he's missing a hand. For all I know a crocodile bit it off
when he was living in Never-Never land. For that matter, why hasn't he had it
replaced?"
He permitted himself a smile. "Are you always this uncharitable, Liz?"
"About lunatics like Thorp? Yes."
"I take it you've met him then? I found him very ... persuasive."
"I debated him on _Channel Lore_ two years ago and I still haven't
gotten the bad taste out of my mouth." I leaned forward and thrust my right