"Spider Robinson - User Friendly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Not Fade Away
Seduction of the Ignorant (speech)

USER FRIENDLY

When he saw the small, weatherbeaten sign which read, WELCOME TO CALAIS, MAINE, Sam
Waterford smiled. It hurt his mouth, so he stopped.
He was tired and wired and as stiff as IRS penalties; he had been driving for ... how long? He did not
really know. There had been at least one entire night; he vividly remembered a succession of headlight
beams coring his eyeballs at some time in the distant past. Another night was near, the sun low in the
sky. It did not matter. In a few more minutes he would have reached an important point in his journey:
the longest undefended border in the world. Once past it, he would start being safe again . . .
He retained enough of the man he had once been to stop when he saw the Duty-Free Store. Reflex
politeness: a guest, especially an unexpected one, brings a gift. But the store was closed. It occurred to
him distantly that in his half-dozen trips through these parts, no matter what time he arrived, that store
had always been closed. The one on the Canadian side, on the other hand, was almost always open. Too
weary to wonder why, he got back into his Imperial and drove on.
He had vaguely expected to find a long lineup at the border crossing, but there was none. The guards
on the American side ignored him as he drove across the short bridge, and the guards on the Canadian
side waved him through. He was too weary to wonder at that, tooтАФand distracted by the mild surge of
elation that came from leaving American soil, leaving the danger zone.
It was purely subjective, of course. As he drove slowly through the streets of St. Stephen, New
Brunswick, the only external reminders that he was in Canada were the speed limit signs marked in
metric and the very occasional bilingual sign (French, rather than the Spanish he was used to in New
York.). Nonetheless, he felt as though the invisible band around his skull had been loosened a few
notches. He found a Liquor Commission outlet and bought a bottle of Old Bushmill's for Greg and
Alice. A Burger King next door reminded him that he had not eaten for . . . however long the trip had
lasted so far, so he bought something squishy and ate it and threw most of it up again a few miles later.
He drove all the rest of that evening, and long into the night, through endless miles of tree-lined
highway interrupted only seldomly by a village speed-trap, and once by the purely nominal border
between the provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, and he reached the city of Halifax as the sun
was coming up on his left. Dimly he realized that he would shortly be drinking Old Bushmill's and
talking, and he expected both to be equally devastating to his system, so he took the trouble to find the
only all-night restaurant in Halifax and tried eating again, and this time it worked. He'd had no chance to
change his money, but of course the waitress was more than happy to accept Yankee currency: even
allowing him a 130% exchange rate, she was making thirty-seven cents profit on each dollar. The food
lifted his spirits just enough that he was able to idly admire Halifax as he drove through it, straining to
remember his way. It had been many years since any city in America had looked this pleasantтАФthe
smog was barely noticeable, and the worst wino he noticed had bathed this year. As he drove past
Citadel Hill he could see the harbor, see pleasure craft dancing on the water (along with a couple of
toothless Canadian Forces destroyers and a sleek black American nuclear sub), see birds riding the
morning updrafts and hear their raucous calls. He was not, of course, in a good mood as he parked in
front of Greg and Alice's house, but he was willing to concede, in theory, that the trick was possible.

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He was still quite groggy; for some reason it seemed tremendously important to knock on the precise
geometrical center of Greg's door, and maddeningly difficult to do so. When the door opened anyway it