"Rudy Rucker - Inside Out" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

tenants, a sheet music sales corporation called, of all things, Bongo Fury. Bongo Fury had gotten some
federal money to renovate the building next door, and were letting Rex's building moulder as some kind
of tax dodge. Rex had the whole second floor for fifty dollars a month. There was a girl artist who rented
a room downstairs; she called it her studio. Her name was Marjorie. She thought Rex was cute. Candy
didn't like the situation.
"How was Marjorie today?" Candy asked, suddenly looking up from her copy of People. It was a
glum Wednesday night.
"Look, Candy, she's just a person. I do not have the slightest sexual interest in Marjorie. Even if I
did, do you think I'd be stupid enough to start something with her? She'd be upstairs bothering me all the
time. You'd find out right away ... life would be even more of a nightmare."
"It just seems funny," said Candy, a hard glint in her eye. "It seems funny, that admiring young girl
alone with you in an abandoned building all day. It stinks! Put yourself in my shoes! How would you like
it?"
Rex went out to the kitchen for a glass of water. "Candy," he said, coming back into the living room.
"Just because you're bored is no reason to start getting mean. Why can't you be a little more rational?"
"Yeah?" said Candy. She threw her magazine to the floor. "Yeah? Well I've got a question for you.
Why don't you get a JOB?"
"I'm trying, hon, you know that." Rex ran his fingers through his thinning hair. "And you know I just
sent the catalogs out. The orders'll be pouring in soon."
"BULL!" Candy was escalating fast. "GET A JOB!"
"Ah, go to hell, ya goddamn naggin ... " Rex moved rapidly out of the room as he said this.
"THAT'S RIGHT, GET OUT OF HERE!"
He grabbed his Kools pack and stepped out on the front stoop. A little breeze tonight; it was better
than it had been. Good night to take a walk, have a cigarette, bring home a Dr. Pepper, and fool around
in his little basement workshop. He had a new effect he was working on. Candy would be asleep on the
couch before long; it was her new dodge to avoid going to bed with him.
Walking towards the 7-Eleven, Rex thought about his new trick. It was a box called Reverse that
was supposed to turn things into their opposites. A left glove into a right glove, a saltshaker into a pepper
grinder, a deck of cards into a Bible, a Barbie doll into a Ken doll. Reverse could even move a coffee
cup's handle to its inside. Of course all the Reverse action could be done by sleight of handтАФthe idea
was to sell the trapdoored Reverse box with before-and-after props. But now, walking along, Rex
remembered his math and tried to work out what it would be like if Reverso were for real. What if it
were possible, for instance, to turn things inside out by inverting in a sphere, turning each radius vector
around on itself, sending a tennis ball's fuzz to its inside, for instance. Given the right dimensional flow, it
could be done ...
As Rex calmed himself with thoughts of math, his senses opened and took in the night. The trees
looked nice, nice and black against the citylit gray sky. The leaves whispered on a rising note. Storm
coming; there was heat lightning in the distance and thundermutter. Buddaboombabububu. The wind
picked up all of a sudden; fat rain started spitting; and then KCRAAACK! there was a blast to Rex's
right like a bomb going off! Somehow he'd felt it coming, and he jerked just the right way at just the right
time. Things crashed all around himтАФwhat seemed like a whole tree. Sudden deaf silence and the
crackling of flames.
Lightning had struck a big elm tree across the street from him; struck it and split it right down the
middle. Half the tree had fallen down all around Rex, with heavy limbs just missing him on either side.
Shaky and elated, Rex picked his way over the wood to look at the exposed flaming heart of the
tree. Something funny about the flame. Something very strange indeed. The flames were in the shape of a
little person, a woman with red eyes and trailing limbs.
"Please help me, sir," said the flame girl, her voice rough and skippy as an old LP. "I am of the folk,
come down on the bolt. I need a flow to live on. When this fire goes out, I'm gone."
"I," said Rex. "You." He thought of Moses and the burning bush. "Are you a spirit?"