"Michael McCollum - Gift" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

"Talent?" I asked.

"Like hell! It was luck. That's right. Pure, unadorned, undeserved, and unexpected dumb luck. You
want to hear the story?"

"If you want to tell it," I said. Of course, I did not know then what I was letting myself in for.

Cowen drained the glass dry and asked for another. Fizz, whirrr, plop and I had it in front of him.

Remember the Vietnam War? No, me neither. Well, it was one of those brush fire things that went on
about forty years ago. Cowen was in college at the time and dropped out to protest US involvement.
To hear him tell it, those were the best days of his life. He and a bunch of others traveled around the
country in a battered Volkswagen van. They organized demonstrations, burned draft cards, and just
generally raised hell.

Then a terrible thing happened. The war ended and Cowen was adrift. He had been one of the
hard-core protesters, a real agitator. Suddenly the cause to which he had given six years of his life was
gone. His side had won. There was nothing left to fight for. He felt like a knight who trips over the Holy
Grail on his way to saddle up his horse. (I hope you realize I am condensing this. By the time Cowen
finally got to war's end, it was almost 2:00 a.m.)

After peace broke out, Cowen just drifted. Bringing down a government had been a heady narcotic.
Nothing afterwards had been the same. He tried consumerism, environmentalism, and even Eastern
religions. Nothing gave him that same feeling of excitement he'd found in the peace movement.

"Have you ever belonged to something?" he asked me while nursing his third drink. "I don't mean the
Boy Scouts or the PTA. I mean really belonged, like everyone around you was part of your family.
That was the feeling that I had lost. It was what I was searching for. "

"Must be a great feeling," I said.

"The best," he agreed.

Eventually his search took him to Los Angeles where he met an old girl friend from the peace movement.
She had found a new cause of her own and invited him to attend a lecture on the dangers of nuclear
power.

"You have heard of nuclear power, haven't you?" Cowen asked me. He slurred the name, of course, but
it came out understandable enough.

"Sure," I said. "Used to be what they propelled submarines with, didn't it?"

He nodded. "They still use it on some of the real old boats, the ones they can't retrofit with cryogenic
storage modules. Other than that, nuclear energy has no use. Know why?'

"Sunscreens are cheaper and safer," I said.

He slammed his fist down on the bar. "Damned right they are. Now, stop interrupting, I've a story to
tell..."