"Destroyer - 025 - Sweet Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

As usual, no one paid any attention. Little by little, however, they began to drift toward their seats as plates of artificial vanilla, flavored chocolate, and fake strawberry ice creams were dropped off at their tables.

Woodward rose to deliver his opening address, one he had written himself, filled with choice tidbits about the little man of the business industry, the unsung praises they all deserved, and his fervent hope of the good write-up their respective presses would give Edgewood University when the lights went out.

He had trouble dealing with anything substantive because Dr. Wooley had belligerently refused to tell anyone anything about what technological breakthrough he had made in the field of television. He had insisted only that "everybody be ready for the plop to hit the fan."

Dr. Harold Smith drummed his fingers, sitting at a table in the rear. Get on with it, he said softly to himself.

Arthur Grassione sat across a table from Don Salvatore Massello, smiling gently at the St. Louis kingpin. Grassione was flanked by Vince Marino and Edward Leung, who kept stealing glances at their boss, hoping he would start eating his ice cream so they could begin eating theirs.

In the front of the slowly darkening room, Patti Shea felt two hands grab her legs. She stabbed one with a plastic fork, hearing a muffled groan to her right side. Then she carefully placed a dish of ice cream on her lap. The other hand, meeting no resistance, scuttled up her leg, then closed triumphantly on a melting slab of ice cream. It withdrew hastily.

Suddenly there was a gleam in the front of the room. It wavered in a multi-colored rectangular shape for a moment, then took form. The entire room stared at a bright, full-color motion picture of a countryside.

It was filled with oxen and working people. Then there was a tall young man working in a water-soaked field. He straightened and the audience saw a handsome Oriental face. The strong face looked back and laughed. Another face filled the screen, an old woman chattering away in another language. The face moved out of the picture and there was a small village with yelping dogs and little yellow children playing together happily. A few men talked to one side. Women walked along the path, smiling. They were thin and dirty, but the thinness was the well-fed muscle of a good diet, and the dirt was the refreshing soil of honest, heavy labor.

The image faded and then changed to a sunset. Seen over trees, it was full of golden promise, and peaceful, almost perfect.

The pictures continued on the high screen mounted on the wall behind the head table, pictures of an impossibly mellow happiness.

Suddenly a voice was heard over the buzzing noises.

"These are views of Vietnam, a Vietnam that none of us has ever known. One that probably no Vietnamese has known in the last twenty-five years. For this is a Vietnam of the imagination. The imagination of my nineteen-year-old adopted daughter."

The lights came back up. Standing to the side of the head table was Professor William Westhead Wooley. He pulled aside a small curtain, so the audience could see a teenaged Oriental girl, sitting in front of a television set. Her eyes were closed and she was smiling even with four discs attached to her throat and temples, leading by wires to the television set.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am Dr. William Wooley. And this is the Dreamocizer. It takes your fantasies, your dreams, your hopesЕ and plays them on your television, just as you envision them."

Silence filled the hall. Don Salvatore Massello leaned forward and looked at the images on the large screen behind the head table, images that were washed out and gray because of the brightened room lights. Arthur Grassione looked at the picture for a moment, then turned away and with a smirk, shared his view with Vince Marino that the device would never sell.

Patti Shea sipped in her breath.

Dr. Harold Smith looked around the room, whose silence was suddenly shattered by a laugh.

It came from the head table, from Lee (Woody) Woodward, the head of college affairs.

"Is that all?" he said, laughing. "Is that all?

Dreams? In full color? Is that all?" He laughed aloud, began to choke on his laughter and reached for a glass of water in front of his ice cream plate.

"Stereophonic sound is optional," Wooley said.

Woodward stopped choking and laughing. "Wooley," he said, "you brought all these people here for that? For a trick?"

The rest of the room was silent. People stared as if at a major highway accident, unable to do anything but sure that something should be done.

"What do you call this?" Wooley said politely, pointing to the overhead picture, which was a duplicate of the image of the small television screen in front of the Oriental girl.

"Hell. Ricidulously easy to put together a fake like that," Woodward said.