"Rudy Rucker - The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

"Stop it, Gretchen. You and meтАФ it's notтАФ"
"I'm serious," said Gretchen, although there was in fact a good chance that she was scamming him.
Gretchen had a twisted mind. "You're my best chance, Jack," she continued. "Marry me and take me
with you. I'm smart. I like sex. And I'm carrying your son."

"UhтАФ"

Just then someone shouted for Gretchen from the corner of the clubhouse building. It was Gretchen's
Dad, standing at the edge of the parking lot. He'd trimmed his flattop to high-tolerance precision and he
was wearing his shiny silver jogging suit. All set for the weekly meeting at the Day Six Synod's
tabernacle.

Gretchen could talk about the Day Six Synod for hours. It was a tiny splinter religion based on the
revelation that Armageddon, the last battle, was coming one-seventh sooner than the Seventh Day
Adventists had thought. We were already in the end times, in fact, with the last act about to be ushered in
by manifestations of Shekinah Glory, this being the special supernatural energy which God тАФ and Satan
тАФ use to manifest themselves. The pillar of fire that led the Israelites to the promised land, the burning
bush that spake to Moses тАФ these had been Shekinah Glory. The Day Six Synod taught that our
Armageddon's Shekinah Glory would take the form of evil UFOs pitted against winged angels.

Karl Karst's jogging suit was silver to remind him of the Shekinah Glory. The Day Six Synod meetings
featured impressively high-end computer graphics representing the Glory in its good and evil forms.
Though Mr. Karst was but a county school-bus mechanic, some of the core founders of the Day Six
Synod were crackpot computer hackers.

"Shake a leg or we'll be late," shouted Mr. Karst. "Hi, Jack and Tonel. Wait till you see who I've got with
me, Gretchen!"

"I'll deal with you later," said Gretchen to Jack with a slight smile. Surely she'd only been teasing him
about the pregnancy. She made the cell-phone gesture with her thumb and pinky. "We'll coordinate."

"Okay," said Jack, walking with her towards her father. "I'm visualizing hole six." Hole six of the KCC
golf course was the popular place for the club's young workers to party. It was well away from the road,
on a hillock surrounded on three sides by kudzu-choked woods.

Right now, Jack figured to eat dinner at Tonel's. He didn't want to go to his own house at all. Because
this morning on the way to the Killeville Country Club, he'd doubled back home, having forgotten his
sunglasses, and through the kitchen window he'd seen his Mom kissing the Reverend Doug Langhorne.

It wasn't all that surprising that Doug Langhorne would make a play for the tidy, crisp widow Jessie
Vaughan, she of the cute figure, tailored suits and bright lipstick. Jessie was the secretary for the
shabby-genteel St. Anselm's Episcopal church on a once-grand boulevard in downtown Killeville, right
around the corner from the black neighborhood where Tonel lived, not that any black people came to St.
Anselm's. Jessie's salary was so meager that Rev. Langhorne let Jessie and Jack live with him in the
rectory, a timeworn Victorian manse right next to the church.

Doug Langhorne's wife and children shared the rectory as well. Lenore Langhorne was a kind, timid soul,
near-sighted, overweight and ineffectual, a not-so-secret drinker of cooking sherry, and the mother of
four demanding unattractive children dubbed with eminent Killeville surnames. Banks, Price, Sydnor, and