"Robert Rankin - Armageddon the Musical" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robert Rankin)

Although Rex enjoyed looking at the mural, he didn't pretend to understand it. He had never seen
the sea and the liner puzzled him greatly. Why, he asked himself, should anyone build a factory so
far from the nearest subway terminus?

The masterpiece had been painted for him, in exchange for food, by a young man who had taken up
temporary lodgings on the sixth-floor landing. Rex never knew the young man's name and once the
painting had been

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completed, he had left without a word. The painting was an enigma, but it touched some distant
chord in Rex and brought a considerable brightness into the otherwise gloomy surroundings.

As the day's first newscast began, a tiny doodad, concealed in the chair's back, sang happy
awakenings into Rex's cerebral cortex and drew the lad awake. Rex yawned and thumbed the remote
controller. The smiling face of the lady newscaster diminished and was gone. Rex stumbled blindly
towards the bathroom, which, along with the kitchen, was too unspeakable to merit a mention. Here
he bathed his eyes and scratched at the stubble on his chin. As sight slowly returned, he glimpsed
his cloudy image in the shaving mirror.

'Damnably handsome,' he assured himself.

And indeed Rex wasn't a bad-looking specimen by any account. A trifle grey-green about the jowls,
but nothing a quick spray of Healthiglo Pallorgone couldn't deal with. And he did bear an uncanny
resemblance to a certain Harrison Ford of ancient days. This might just have been the product of
happy coincidence, but the fact that his mother had been allowed access to the state sperm banks,
whose stocks had been cryogenically laid down in the 1990s, probably played some part in it.

Rex attended to his daily toilet, picking off any flaky bits and doing what little he could to
make himself look presentable. From the three he possessed, he chose the shirt which was the least
crisp beneath the armpits and gave it a dusting with Bugoff Personal Livestock Ex-terminator. Once
clad in his most dashing apparel, he opened a tin of synthafood and took breakfast.
Un-fortunately, the label had come off and Rex was unable to identify the contents. His morning
repast completed,

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he fought off the feelings of nausea which inevitably followed mealtimes. Today they were somewhat
more acute than usual, Rex having just consumed a tin of paint.

Rex belched mightily and zipped^himself into his radiation suit. Screwing on the weatherdome, he
stepped through the airlock, primed the anti-theft devices on his front door and set off down the
stairs to face the new day.

And it wasn't a bad one by any account. Although the clouds hung but a few hundred feet above the
rooftops and the crackles of the early electrical storm offered uncertain illumination, at least
it wasn't raining. Rex* switched on his chestlights and pressed on through the murk towards the
nearby subway terminus. Today was to be the first day of his first-ever job and he had no wish to
be late.