"John Morressy - Last Jerry Fagin Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

political figure. And he did. And they always paid.
The payoff was never money. By this time Jerry wasn't worried about
money. He wanted other things. He just hung in there and smiled and played
kindly Uncle Jerry until he needed a favor. He never had to ask twice.
Everybody knew that what Jerry Fagin had built up overnight he could tear down
just as fast.
When the alien ship landed in Washington, Jerry counted up his LO.U.'s
and decided that it was pay-up time. He must have called in every one he had
to get that thing on his show, but he succeeded. At the personal request of
the President, no less.
 The alien was called Twelve. He came from a planet with a name that
sounded like cowflop being tossed into a mudhole. Some White House speech
writer tagged it Brother Earth, and that was the name that stuck, over the
protests of the enraged feminists.
Twelve looked like a human being designed
by a committee and built by nursery-school dropouts. He seemed to have started
out to be symmetrical, but missed. Two arms and two legs, like us, but they
were of different lengths and thicknesses and set just a bit off center. Body
lumpy as a potato, with a smaller potato for a head. Two eyes, a nose, and a
mouth, but they moved around like the features of a melting snowman. Above one
eye was a shiny spot. Twelve called it the weiox and tried to explain its
function. No one understood a damned thing he said about it. They figured it
was some kind of ear and let it go at that.
Aside from his weiox and a few other small details, mostly internal,
Twelve made himself pretty clear right from the start. It turned out that he
had been orbiting Earth for the last sixty-three hailumes, which was somewhere
around twenty-seven of our years. All that time he was monitoring our
broadcasts. And since most of his source material was supplied by television
and radio, he had picked up a peculiar view of humanity.
For one thing, I think Twelve never really grasped the fact that there's
a difference-most of the time, anyway-between a sitcom rerun and the Eleven
O'Clock News, or an old Cagney movie and a junk-food commercial. They were all
new to him, and all equally real. Or unreal. Or whatever.
Twelve's civilization had no word for entertainment. The concept simply
did not exist for them. They did have some kind of music, but it wasn't an art
form; it was a part of their

digestive process. And that was all. They had no drama, no literature of any
kind, no art, and absolutely no sense of humor.
They didn't have wars, either, and Twelve didn't seem to know what
weapons were for. So everyone breathed a lot easier.
Now, it was clear to me that if you're going to interview something like
Twelve on television, live-before the biggest audience in history-you go get
Sevareid out of retirement, or you hunt up a Lippmann or a Cronkite or
somebody serious like that. You want the kind of people who cover elections
and moon landings. You don't want Jerry Fagin.
But nobody asked me. Jerry Fagin landed the alien and scheduled him for
a Friday night show. Then he sat back, read the headlines, listened to his
telephones ring, and gloated.