"Spider Robinson - The Magnificent Conspiracy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

I don't know [he said] if I can convey what it's like to be born preposterously
wealthy, Mr. Campbell, so I won't try. It presents one with an incredible view of
reality that cannot be imagined by a normal human being. The world of the very rich
is only tangentially connected with the real world, for all that their destinies are
intertwined. I lived totally in that other world and that world view for thirty-six years,
happily moving around mountains of money with a golden bulldozer, stoking the
fires of progress. I rather feel I was a typical multibillionaire, if that conveys anything
to you. My only eccentric-ity was a passion for working on cars, which I had
absorbed in my youth from a chauffeur I admired. I had access to the finest
assistance and education the world had to offer, and became rather handy. As good
as I was with international finance and real estate and arbitrage and interlocking
cartels and all the other avenues through which a really enormous fortune is
intercon-nected with the world, I enjoyed manipulating my fortune, using itтАФin some
obscure way I believe I felt a duty to do so. And I always made a profit.
It was in London that it changed.
I had gone there to personally oversee a large and complex merger involving seven
nations. The limousine had just left the airport when the first shot killed my driver.
He was the man who taught me how to align-bore a block and his name was Ted.
The window was down; he just hurled sideways and soiled his pants. I think I
figured it out as the second shot got my personal bodyguard, but by then we were
under the wheels of the semi. I woke up eight weeks later, and one of the first things
I learned is that no one is ever truly unconscious. I woke up speaking in a soft but
pronounced British accent precisely like that of my private nurses, and it persisted
for two days.
I discovered that Phillip, the bodyguard, had died. So had Lisa, a lady who meant
entirely too little to me. So had Teal, the London regional director who had met my
plane, and the driver of the semi. The rifleman had been appre-hended: a common
laborer, driven mad by his poverty. He had taken a gun to traffic in the same way
that a consistently mistreated Dober-man will attack anyone who approaches,
because it seemed to him the only honorable and proper response to the world.

[Cardwell drank deep from his beer.]

My convalescence was long. The physical crisis was severe, but the spiritual
trauma was infinitely greater. Like Saint Paul, I had been smashed from my horse,
changed at once from a mover and shaper to a terrified man who hurt terribly in
many places. The best drugs in the world cannot truly kill painтАФthey blunt its edge
without removing it, or its terrible reminder of mortality. I had nearly died, and I
suddenly had a tremendous need to explain to myself why that would have been
such a tragedy. I could not but wonder who would have mourned for me, and how
much, and I had a partial answer in the shallow extent of my own mourning for Ted
and Phillip and Teal and Lisa. The world I had lived my life in was one in which
there was little love, in which the glue of social relationships was not feelings, but
common interests. I had narrowly, by the most costly of medical miracles, avoided
inconveniencing many hundreds of people, and not a damn thing else.
And, of course, I could not deal with this consciously or otherwise. My world
view lacked the "spiritual vocabulary" with which to frame these concepts: I
desperately needed to resolve a conflict I could not even express. It delayed my
effective recovery for weeks beyond the time when I was technically "on my
feet"тАФI was simply unable to reenter the lists of life, unable to see why living was