"Spider Robinson - The Immediate Family" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

did not share that distinction with any other part of his body except his fingernails. He made me think of
hobbits. Surly hobbits. He wore a brown leather jacket, a long scarf, a black turtleneck, basketball
shoes, and white jockey shorts. There were a motorcycle hel-met and a pair of leather gloves on the bar
beside him.
"How did you get in there?" I asked, as calmly as I could, aware of people gawking over my
shoulder,
He looked at me as if I had asked a very stupid question, and pointed silently upward.
Like Callahan's Place before it, Mary's Place had an access hatch to the roof. Or rather, it had had. I
hadn't rigged up a ladder to it yet, because it was awkwardly placed, almost di-rectly over the bar. Now
there was no longer a hatch thereтАФjust a yawning hole where the hatch had been. The hatch cover was
the kindling around the stranger's feet.
"You broke in from the roof?" I said.
He grimaced. "Not voluntarily," he assured me. "I could have done with-out the last eight feet or so
of that little journey. But I didn't get a vote. This is good beer." He made the last part sound like a
grudging admission.
"Rickard's Red," I said, seeing the color. "From Canada."
"No," he said, frowning as though I'd called an automatic a revolver, or spelled "adrenalin" with an e
on the end. "From Ontario. Americans al-ways make that mistake."
Shorty came bustling up behind me. "Is he alive?" he asked.
"Are you alive?" I asked the stranger.
"No, I'm on tape," he said disgust-edly, and gulped more beer.
"Honest to God, Mister," Shorty said, trying to push past me, "I never saw you. Be honest, I wasn't
look-ingтАФit just never occurred to me anybody could be on my tail at that speedтАФ"
"I was in your slipstream, Andretti, saving gas; are you familiar with the concept or shall I do a lecture
on ele-mentary aerodynamics? Even a rocket scientist like you will concede that there's not much point
in doing that unless the guy is going at a hell of a clip, now is there?"
"Well, I never seen ya," Shorty said uncertainly.
"That's because you weren't look-ing," the stranger explained.
"One of you want to tell me what happened?" I asked. To my pleased surprise I heard my voice
come out the way Mike Callahan would have said it in my place. A quiet, polite request for information,
with the ex-plicitly mortal threat all in the under-tones.
The stranger looked up at the ceil-ing again. No, at the sky. Apparently God signaled him to get it
over with. He sighed. "I was following that ma-niac at aтАФ"
"'Idiot,' " Long-Drink interrupted. "If they're in front of you, they're idiots."
The stranger glared at him, and de-cided to ignore him. "тАФhundred and twenty when he made an
unsignaled left into your parking lot without slowing. On a Suzuki at that speed, you don't want to bust
out of the slip-stream at an angle, so I swallowed my heart and cornered with himтАФbetter, of
courseтАФand there we both were, bearing down on a brick building at 120 together, and I would like to
state for the record that I would not, repeat not have hit him if his god-damned brake lights had been
working!"
"Are they out again?" Shorty asked mournfully.
The stranger looked at him. "Or if his brakes hadn't been so goddamned good."
"I hafta get new shoes every couple of months," Shorty said.
"No shit, Sherlock. How did I magi-cally divine this information before you told me? I don't know, I
must be psychic."
"You ploughed into the back of Shorty's car on a motorcycle?" I asked.
"That," he agreed, "was the very last moment I was on a motorcycle this evening. A microsecond
later I was airborne."
"Jesus," Doc Webster said, and pushed Shorty aside to take a turn at trying to get past me. But even
he couldn't manage it.