"Oltion-BeforeChristmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oltion Jerry)

He didn't have to get a present this morning, of course. He still had this
evening, and two more shopping days left after that before Christmas. He just
wanted to get it taken care of early, so he could relax about it and concentrate
on the last-minute ads for this afternoon's and tomorrow's electronic newsnet
editions. The agency was swamped with clients this year, all of whom claimed
that sales were way down and who wanted Mike and his co-workers to design
completely new ad campaigns for them overnight.

Mike recognized the irony in an advertising art director who didn't know what to
buy for his wife, but despite all the hype he spread about his clients'
products, he hadn't yet found anything that Sarah might want.

He considered asking one of the women at the office what they thought, but he
didn't want to resort to that. A present was supposed to be from the giver, not
from his co-workers. And besides, they were all advertisers. They would just try
to push their own product lines on him.

Sarah stepped into the dining room with just a fluffy blue towel wrapped around
her body. Her red hair dripped water from the ends, and a few drops landed on
Mike's briefcase as she bent over to kiss him on the cheek. He glanced down to
see if she'd hit the artwork, but she'd just missed it, so he nudged the
briefcase aside with his toe and kissed her more enthusiastically, inhaling the
aroma of soap and fresh-washed skin that he loved so much in the mornings. He
slipped a hand under the towel, and she giggled. "You silly, you'll be late for
work if you start that again."

"I could always loop back," he said, tugging playfully on the towel.

"And I could invite the neighbors in to watch," she said, backing away and
re-wrapping herself in the towel.

It was an old argument, reduced by now to those two lines. Sarah saw no point in
doing something that would obviously be edited out when the people involved
backspaced into their normal lives, while Mike felt that any pleasant experience
was worth exploring, no matter how illusory it might turn out to be. It wasn't
just an argument over fooling around, either. The fallout from their different
philosophies spread through their entire marriage. Sarah didn't like going to
movies that might gross her out or bore her, while Mike felt that he should try
everything that came along, and just edit out later the ones he thought were a
waste of time. Sarah didn't like experimenting with food, while Mike would eat
practically anything short of live bugs-- and he may have even tried that once
or twice, but if so then he'd definitely backspaced over the experience because
he didn't remember it.

That was Sarah's point. If you didn't remember it, if in the final version of
reality you had never even done it, then why bother to do it in the first place?

And Mike's answer was always "Why not?" Lots of people did invite the neighbors
over for orgies. Mike had heard of stranger things than that, too; murder
mystery parties with authentic murders, religious mass-suicides that were undone