"Spider Robinson - God is an Iron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)
GOD IS AN IRON
By Spider Robinson
I smelled her before I saw her. Even so, the first sight of her was shocking. She was sitting in a tan
plastic-surfaced armchair, the kind where the front comes up as the back goes down. It was back as far
as it would go. It was placed beside the large living-room window, whose curtains were drawn. A plastic
block table next to it held a digital clock, a dozen unopened packages of Peter Jackson cigarettes, a glass
jar full of packs of matches, an empty ashtray, a full vial of cocaine, and . a lamp with a bulb of at least
150 watts. It illuminated her with brutal clarity.
She was naked. Her skin was the color of vanilla pudding. Her hair was in rats, her nails unpainted
and untended, some overlong and some broken. There was dust on her. She sat in a ghastly sludge of
feces and urine. Dried vomit
was caked on her chin and between her breasts and down her ribs to the chair.
These were only part of what I had smelled. The predominant odor was of fresh baked bread. It is
the smell of a person who is starving to death. The combined effluvia had prepared me to find a senior
citizen, paralyzed by a stroke or some such crisis.
I judged her to be about twenty-five years old.
I moved to where she could see me, and she did not see me. That was probably just as well, because
I had just seen the two most horrible things. The first was the smile. They say that when the bomb went
surface of my brain in much the same way. I don't want to talk about that smile.
The second most horrible thing was the one that explained all the rest. From where I now stood I
could see a triple socket in the wall beneath the window. Into it were plugged the lamp, the clock, and
her.
I knew about wire heading, of course-I had lost a couple of acquaintances and one friend to the
juice. But I had never seen a wirehead. It is by definition a solitary vice, and all the public usually gets to
see is a sheeted figure being carried out to the wagon.
The transformer lay on the floor beside the chair where it had been dropped. The switch was on,
and the timer had been jiggered so that instead of providing one five- or ten- or fifteen-
second jolt per hour it allowed continuous flow. That timer is required by law on all juice rigs sold, and
you need special tools to defeat it. Say, a nail file. The input cord was long, fell in crazy coils from the
wall socket. The output cord disappeared beneath the chair, but I knew where it ended. It ended in the
tangled snarl of her hair, at the crown of her head, ended in a miniplug. The plug was snapped into a
jack surgically implanted in her skull, and from the jack tiny wires snaked their way through the wet
jelly to the hypothalamus, to the specific place in the medial forebrain bundle where the major pleasure
center of her brain was located. She had sat there in total transcendent ecstasy for at least five days.
I moved, finally. I moved closer, which surprised me. She saw me now, and impossibly the smile
became a bit wider. I was marvelous. I was captivating. I was her perfect lover. I could not look at the
smile; a small plastic tube ran from one corner of the smile and my eyes followed it gratefully. It was
held in place by small bits of surgical tape at her jaw, neck, and shoulder, and from there it ran in a lazy
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