"Destroyer - 025 - Sweet Dreams" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)
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CHAPTER NINE
Revenge was sweet. It had been a long time coming for Dr. William Westhead Wooley, five long years since Lee (Woody) Woodward had gotten the position Wooley had wanted, as head of college affairs. Five years in which Woodward had browbeaten him and denigrated his work. Five years in which Woodward had taken every opportunity to criticize Wooley, to undercut him with university officials, five years of trying to make Wooley a laughing stock on the campus and off.
Wooley understood why Woodward acted that way. It was the age-old conflict between the administrator and the artist, between the technician and the inventor. Woodward had been jealous of Wooley's genius and had tried to drag him down into the intellectual gutter of Woodward's own brain.
Five long years.
And all of it was repaid tonight, in twenty seconds of televised fantasy.
Wooley could not contain a smile. His adopted daughter, Leen Forth, looked at him quizzically.
"What's so funny, Dad?" she said.
He shushed her by pressing his right index finger to her lips.
They sat in a darkened office upstairs from the cafeteria where the Dreamocizer had just been displayed. Downstairs, Wooley could hear the scuffling feet of men who had followed him from the cafeteria, wanting to talk to him, to be the first to try to buy the Dreamocizer from him. Perhaps even to try to steal it.
Unconsciously, he pulled the translator, the small device which was able to convert fantasy thoughts into television images, closer to his chest.
Let them all wait. A night of sleeping on what they had seen and tomorrow the offers would be that much higher, the deal that much sweeter.
Not only money but recognition. To be something, to be someone, the purpose that had directed Dr. William Westhead Wooley's entire life.
He didn't want his name in lights. But he wanted a table at the best restaurants at 7:45 o'clock on Saturday nights and he didn't want to wait. He wanted to be recognized and pointed out on the streets.
He wanted Pearl Bailey to point him out in the audience during curtain calls.
Was that too much to ask?
His wife had never understood and that was why she was now his ex-wife.
She couldn't understand the driven hour after driven hour he had spent working on his invention-"tinkering" she called it. Why couldn't he just be content with being another professor at Edgewood U.? Why couldn't he enjoy his wife and their adopted daughter and their neat little house on campus and be like other people?
And he tried to tell her that teaching a course in "Technology of Cinema and Television" wasn't the way he wanted to spend his life. He tried to tell her about the students' experimental films- all nothing more than a series of arty ways to get their girlfriends to take off their clothes. That was all he saw day after day. Young girls taking off their clothes while the proud filmmaker exclaimed: "I experimented with the light sources."
Last term, the highlight had been three minutes of a young woman throwing up into a toilet while the camera zoomed in and out of her bloody private parts. When Wooley asked him what it was all about, the student filmmaker said it was a statement for legalized abortion.
And when Wooley asked what emotion he thought the film might evoke from an audience, the student went into a hysterical fifteen-minute dissertation on the holy integrity of the filmmaking process.
Before the sex films, there had been the musicals, all played in the nude. Before that, the students had done Macbeth as a western. Banjoes and all.
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