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

hands for quiet. Twelve's eyes and nose moved around a little and then were
still.
"Our guest has requested one courtesy," Jerry said. "Whistling sets up a
painful feedback in his communication apparatus; so I must insist that no one
whistle during the show."
a
"Thank you, Mr. Jerry Fagin," said Twelve. His voice rolled out in a
deep, gluey flow, like gravel being tumbled around in syrup.
"Thank you for consenting to appear on our show, Mr. Ambassador. It's a
great honor." Jerry said.
Once Jerry got started thanking he couldn't stop himself. He thanked the
President, Congress, the armed forces, the American people, the audience, the
network, his friends, his sponsors-individually, by name-his parents, and his
current wife, then went on to thank the rulers of Twelve's planet, the
spaceship industry there, and everyone else-right down to Newton, Galileo, and
Einstein-who might possibly have had a bearing on Twelve's appearance here.
The only name he didn't drop was God's. Maybe he should have thrown that in.
Finally, after all the preliminaries and all the back-patting, Twelve
got his chance to speak. This was the big moment, the message to humankind
from outer space, the voice from the stars. Everyone listened in absolute
silence.
And Twelve was boring as hell.
It's ridiculous to think that someone who has actually crossed
interstellar space with word from another world could be dull, but that's what
Twelve was. He may have been dynamite on his own world, but on Earth he was a
dud. It wasn't entirely his fault. In his monitoring he had picked up every
cliche in the English language, and he was using all of them. That burbly
voice didn't help, either.

By the time Twelve had assured everyone that he looked upon his mission
as a great and historic challenge, that he came in hopes of establishing a
lasting friendship between our two great peoples, that a new era in the
history of the galaxy was dawning and he was proud and humbled to be given the
chance to serve and so on and so on-it sounded as if he had memorized every
campaign handout of the past forty years-Jerry could smell trouble. The studio
audience was fidgeting noisily. People were coughing and shuffling their feet.
I caught the quick flickering of the eyes, the giveaway that Jerry was
getting edgy. I could almost hear his brain going. Here was Jerry on the
biggest night of his career, the biggest night in television history, and his
guest was bombing. He could picture that audience of a hundred ninety-two
million American viewers scratching their bellies and saying. "Hey, Honey,
what do you say we switch over to the naked dancers on Channel 8?"
So Jerry made his move. If Twelve couldn't carry his weight as a guest,
he'd just have to pay his passage any way he could.

Twelve was gurgling on, ending a long speech about interplanetary
solidarity. I returned my attention to him. ". . . With shared hope for the
future and with a deep and abiding faith in the basic decency and fundamental
goodwill of the fine people of Earth that encourages me to predict a new age
of brotherhood and justice in which races will ask not what the galaxy will do