"Spider Robinson - Very Bad Deaths" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

bread dough that wasn't going to rise. Facially, he looked like the fetus that would one day be Alfred
Hitchock. With five-o'clock shadow.
"Hello, Slim," he said.
I stopped short, halfway to the obligatory handshake. I didn't want to; irrationally, I wanted to be a
moving target for that smell. But I was struck by what he'd called me.
Physically I was the backwards of him. As I had since the sixth grade, I stood six two, and weighed
maybe one forty-five. Fully dressed, after a long walk in the rain. "Slim" was what I had always secretly
wished people would call me. But no one ever had. My actual nickname throughout high school had
been "Rail." The printable one, anyway. Somehow, I'd managed to get through freshman year of college

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 - Chapter 3

without picking up any nickname at all. But I knew my luck was due to run out.
"What do people call you?" I asked, as if I didn't know.
"Zudie, usually," he said, as if he didn't know. "But friends call me Zandor." He pronounced it not like
manned oar, but like the last half of the name Alexander. For all I knew it was the Serbo-Croatian
equivalent.
His voice made me think, Tweety Bird has finally conquered the lisp.
Something about his eyes caught my attention. Not the eyes themselves. They were ordinary, hazel, a bit
moist. Nor was it the way they met mine steadily. This was 1967. A lot of people looked you square in
the eye and didn't look away. It was the way his eyes looked at me.
They said that he forgave me.
In advance. For whatever. If I despised him for who he was, he would accept it. If I needed to be cruel to
him to tolerate his presence, he was prepared to work with that. He was used to it. If I preferred to be
polite to his face, then say cruel things about him behind his back, that was okay too. If I simply couldn't
bear him, and had to go back and scream until I got assigned some other roommate, he wouldn't hold it
against me.
I was very young. But even back then, I dimly sensed that it might be a worthwhile thing to know
somebody who was good at forgiving. It was a skill I wanted to learn myself. And I'd probably never get
a better student project.
So I unfroze, took that last couple of steps forward, and finished bringing my hand up into handshake
range. My nose wanted me to grimace, but I suppresed it. "Pleased to meet you, Zandor."
"Pleased to meet you, Russell." We shook.
Go for it. "I think I like Slim better, actually." His hand didn't feel particularly slimy, or greasy, or
encrusted with anything. His grip was not strong or aggressive, but neither was it weak or submissive.
His fingers were a bit on the thick side. His skin was very warm.
"Sure." He broke the handshake, stepped back, and gestured. "Look, Slim, I'm open to discussion, but I
thought we both might be more comfortable with things arranged this way. What do you think?"
For the first time I took in the room. It was almost a generic dorm room. A rectangular box the
approximate dimensions of a cargo container. Total contents: two single beds (thin mattress on metal
spring frame), two maple desks with matching maple chair, a desk lamp and a short maple bookshelf on
the wall above, and two maple dressers. The only thing that kept it from being exactly like every other
one in the building was that since it was a corner room, it had windows on two walls.
But SmellyтАФI was determined to call him Zandor, but I already doubted I would ever think of him as
anything but SmellyтАФhad changed the room even more, by rearranging the furniture. The standard
pattern was that, as you came in the door you passed first a pair of closets on either side, each capacious
enough to hold three sports coats at once, then a dresser on either side, and then a desk on either side,
and then a bed on either side, and then your nose hit the window.
Smelly had moved things. As you came in, there was a bed on the leftтАФclearly his, already made, with