"Rudy Rucker - The Man Who Ate Himself" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

believe how skinny he'd gotten. Lung cancer. He pushed one of the buttons set into the hoe handle. The
inner gate opened for us.
"Welcome, boys! Welcome to my little Garden of Eden. Let me show you mah plot!" His diseased voice
had a grainy, raucous quality.

I got out and went over to glad-hand our pigeon, but Harry just sat in the car, ostentatiously picking his
teeth.

"Y'all wouldn't have to do that if you'd stop eatin' flesh!" Marston called out to him. "Live and let live.
It's Mother Nature's law!" Marston had been one of America's most vocal vegetarians for several years
now.

Harry examined the end of his toothpick. "That's not what you said when you closed down the solar
energy companies, Mr. Marston." He spoke without looking up. "Back then it was eat or be eaten."

Marston looked back at me with a genial smile. "Guess ah've always wanted to see me a real genius.
Now ah know." He hooked his thumb towards Harry and stage-whispered, "Looks lahk a cross
between a cowpie and an albino toad, don't he?"

"Really, Van." A melodious voice came from the shady porch. "That's no way to talk about the author of
The Geometrodynamics of the Degenerate Tensor?" In true Southern-belle style, each sentence ended as
a question.

"Well, point mah head and call me doctor," Marston chortled. "Ah had no ideah!"

Evangeline Marston walked down the steps, a graceful arm outstretched. She wore a jiggling T-shirt and
skintight red lame jeans. I had to bite my tongue to keep from moaning.

"Don't listen to Van, Dr. Gerber. We're really so happy to meet you." Harry pocketed his toothpick and
got out of the car with alacrity. He was as much of a homy bastard as the next man.

"I didn't realize you were abreast of current cosmological theory, Mrs. Marston." Harry's big livery lips
stretched in a wet smile. "I'd be happy to send you some preprints."
"Oh, you would? I have the nicest little professor at Austin who'd be so delighted. And do call me
Evangeline."
"Pleased to meet you, Evangeline" I sang out, and basked for an instant in her warm gaze. Harry grunted
something similar.

"Y'all just have to come see mah crops now," Marston said, waving us around the house. "Ol' Eva and
me have been livin' off the land, ain't we, sugar?" He gave the gorgeous red apple of her rear a lingering
pat.

In back of the house Marston had his famous garden. He always had his TV spots filmed with him
standing in it ... usually leaning on that goddamn hoe. All his companies had ever done was to rip the
Earth off, but now the fact that he had a garden was supposed to make us forget all that.

For all Marston's talk about Mother Earth, you could tell that he had a crazy fear that the old girl was
going to get back at him. He was so scared of ending up underground that he'd hired us to help him
launch his corpse into outer space. According to his letter, he only had a few weeks left.