"Spider Robinson - C8 - Callahan' s Key" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

up with was coined not by me but by Dr. Jaymie Matthews (who also came up with the title for my
triweekly Technology column in The Globe and Mail, Past Imperfect, Future Tenser).
Finally, my thanks to the late great madman Henry Morrison Flagler, without whom the whole
enterprise would not have been necessary-and to you, without whom it would have been pointless.

-Howe Sound, British Columbia 9 June, 1999




Reality is what doesn't go away when you stop believing in it...
-PHILIP K. DICK

If it ain't one thing, it's two things.
-GRANDFATHER STONEBENDER



CHAPTER ONE
Cold Reboot


"The future will be better tomorrow."
-J. Danforth Quayle


IT'S ALWAYS COLDEST before the warm.
Oh, it could have been colder that day, I guess-I hear there are places up north where
fifty below is considered a balmy day. But it could be a lot hotter than where I am now, if it
comes to that. This is just about as warm as I care to be-and the day the whole thing started, I
was as cold as I ever hope to get again in my life.
It was only twenty below, that day. . . but for Long Island, that's unusually frosty, even
in the dead of winter. Which that winter surely was: dead as folk music. Dead as Mary's Place.
Dead as Callahan's Place. Dead as my life, or my hopes for the future. You've read Steinbeck's THE


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WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT? Well, 1989 was the winter of our despair...
It's the little things you remember. You know how snow gets into your boots and makes you
miserable? I had been forced to stagger through a drift of snow so deep it had gotten into my
pants. A set of long underwear makes a wonderful wick. The damp patches from above and below had
met at my knees almost at once.
Not that snow of yesterday's blizzard had fallen to a depth of waist height. Long Island
isn't Nova Scotia or anything. My long soggies were simply the result of my tax dollars at work.
Just as I'd been in sight of my home-driving with extreme caution, and cursing the damned
Town of Smithtown that should have plowed this stretch of Route 25A yesterday, for Chrissake-I had
seen the town snowplow, coming toward me from the east. I'd experienced a microsecond of elation
before the situation became clear to me, and then I had moaned and banged my forehead against the