"Spider Robinson - The End of the Painbow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

PART ONE: THE DUCK

It was our second night in Mary's Place, and things were going pretty good. The fire was crackling in
the hearth. The Fount of All Blessings, our state-of-the-art coffee maker, was working well, making
magic out of all natural ingredients. The booze flowed. More viscously, puns flowed.
Me, I had trouble in mind. But I had it so far down below the surface that not even my best friends
caught me at it. We all had a problem, a big problem, and I was the only one who knew it. Since there
was no solution to the problem, why bring everybody down?
And at least my bar was a pleasant place to be worried in. Good company in good spirits will get
you through a lot. Fast Eddie at his piano was in rare form.
Jonathan Crawford wasn't there that night: he had a hot lead to chase, and would be too busy to
drink for a while. Paradoxically, perhaps, now that we had proved to him that he might not be
responsible for the existence of AIDS after all, he was more determined than ever to help stamp it out.
There were about a dozen more people present than the previous eveningтАФBen and Barbara, Stan and
Joyce, Tina and Victor, Jim and Joan, Herb, a few othersтАФbut except for our first newcomer, the Lucky
Duck, all of them qualified as Immediate Family. That is, people who had been present in Mike
Callahan's saloon the night it was converted to a rapidly expanding plasma. Folks in a position to tell you,
from personal knowledge, what a nuclear firestorm is like up close.
People had been telling the Duck Callahan's Place stories all nightтАФand either he believed every one
of them, or the furry little bastard was damned if he'd give us the satisfaction of seeing how much he
admired our skill as liars. I wondered which was true. From everything we'd learned about him the night
before, extraordinary occurrences were utterly commonplace to himтАФbut his pan was so dead, even
beneath all that beard, that you had to wonder if it was costing him effort to keep it that way. Folks
began to try to blow his mind, to come up with a true story that would exceed his credulity limit. Then at
one pointтАФjust as Long-Drink McGonnigle had finished telling him about Dink Fogerty, who for a short
time could make a dart board want darts, the Duck suddenly counterattacked.
"You find that unusual?" he said. "Strike you as bizarre, does it?" His tone was negligent, but his voice
was loud enough to draw eyes. (Odd, that voice of his. You couldn't call it beautiful, exactly, with that
honking quality to it, but it was certainly commanding, almost mesmerizing, when he wanted it to be.)
"You citizens think you know about weird, is that right? Watch this, turkeys!" He slid from his chair,
strolled with lazy grace through the crowd to the television set, punched it on, and returned to the bar.
Those of us who could not see the screen (most of us) were oddly wary of changing that status; as
one, we looked to Fast Eddie, who could see the screen from his piano bench, for a report.
"Program crawl," he announced, puzzled.
We understood what he meant. We just didn't understand what it meant. All cable TV companies
reserve one channel for an endlessly scrolling list of which programs are scheduled on what channels for
the next hour and a half, in half-hour blocks. So what? Eddie squinted at the programs listed, found
nothing to report for a few seconds ... and then suddenly his eyes grew very wide and round.
"HO-ly тАж shit," he said hoarsely, and checked his watch, and looked at the screen some more, and
rubbed at his eyes with his hands, and so on until Long-Drink lost patience and snapped, "What the hell
is it, Ed?"
"It's now," Eddie croaked. He looked appealingly at Long-Drink. "Right now. I mean, now just
started ... now."
Rooba rooba rooba, said the crowd.
We all understood Eddie perfectly. The program scrawl typically lists ninety minutes' worth of
programming on forty-some channels, in half hour incrementsтАФand an Iron Law of the Universe states
that if you access the program scrawl 1,000 times at random, 871 times it will have just finished the
present half-hour period, forcing you to wait the maximum possible amount of time for the information
you seek. An additional 127 times, you'll be trying to find out what's going to start in the next half-hour
slot, so that block will have just finished. The only thing more certain is that if you give up and spin the