"Kevin O'Donnel Jr. - A usefull Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Jr Kevin)

again."
 "Shrapnel? Were you in the war?"
"Yes, ma'am. In the hospital, they gave me a wristwatch with all the usual features and two really
unique ones---gauges that display the pressure on the artificial sphincters implanted in my bladder and
colon. They taught me how to read the gauges so that I'd know when to start looking around for a toilet,
and how to open the valves between my legs so that I didn't get my hands dirty. They used the word
'lucky' a lot. As in, 'You know, soldier, you're lucky---most boys with wounds like these would have
died.'"
"While you thought it was the dead ones who were lucky?"
"Exactly. So when they let me out, I got an ice pick, and crawled into a warm bath. The plan
was to punch enough holes through the femoral artery on each leg so that it wouldn't take more than a
few minutes to die. See, given no sensation below the hips at all, it wouldn't have hurt a bit. But how
many holes to punch? I called a Friendly Ear. We talked for three, four hours. By the end of the call,
he'd convinced me to wait one year. If life still sucked, I could do myself in with his blessings. At the
end of the year, I looked around and decided things weren't so bad after all. Understand, they weren't
good---they're still not---but they weren't so bad that death was preferable to life. This guy had me in
his debt, but I couldn't pay him back. Friendly Ears are anonymous. So I joined hoping to do for others
what he did for me."
She didn't say a word for a long time. He let silence fill the line while he wiped sweat from his
forehead and inhaled the hot, dry air of his greenhouse.
"Friendly Ear?" she said at last.
"Yes, ma'am?"
"Are you tracing my call?"
"You know that's impossible."
"I know they say it's impossible, but what I need to know is the truth---are you?"
"No. When you dial 1-8000-AFRIEND, some very special software that the phone company
wrote exclusively for us takes over. It chooses a Friendly Ear at random and connects you without
making any record of the call, internal or external. At this moment, Ma Bell's computers know that
you're using your phone, and I'm using mine, but only one chip knows we're connected, and it won't tell
the rest that we're talking to each other."
"Who else could we be talking to?"
"Ma'am, there are a hundred thousand Friendly Ears, and we each take a couple calls a day.
There's four or five thousand calls going on right at this minute. Now, the computers might assume you're
talking to a Friendly Ear and I'm talking to a new friend---if their programming lets them make that sort of
assumption---but if they try trace the call, the chip disconnects us and zeroes its memory. So don't
worry."
"You're sure?"
"Yes, ma'am. Positive."
"Good." She paused for a few seconds. "I'm trapped here."
"That's a horrible feeling, isn't it?" He wheeled down the tiled path between the benches to the
first tray of Parodia. "But how do you mean, trapped?"
"I mean I can't get away."
A familiar lament. Perhaps the most familiar of all. "You can't get away from what---a
relationship? Your career?" Flowerbuds had swelled on four Parodias since Friday. He priced those
pots and shifted them to the front row; his assistant would move them into the store tomorrow.
"The planet."
"Ah." Not so familiar. He straightened in his chair. The other Parodia trays could wait. "You
mean this planet? The planet Earth?"
"Yes. I want to go home, but they haven't come back for me. It's been six years. They're not
coming back. I'm going to die on an alien planet and I won't have a grave loy so why shouldn't I just go