"Norman Spinrad - He Walked Among Us" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

Because a few of these people were real scientists?
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Becausethey believed in Dexter D. Lampkin even thoughhe foundthem ludicrous?

Or because, God help him, some part of him still believed in THE TRANSFORMATION too?

Out in the front yard, the Santa Ana wind rattled the sere skeletal palm fronds, set dusty swirls of dead
leaves dancing, and dried the back reaches of his throat. Your average Angeleno professed a loathing for
the Santa Ana, which ripped shingles from your roof, whipped brush fires up into roaring infernos, and
supposedly brought out the homicidal crazies. But Dexter took a great big honk as he walked across the
yard to the garage.

Dexterloved the Santa Ana.

He loved those negative ions sweeping in off the desert, stoking up the old endorphins, tingling his
dendrites with norepinephrene, boosting the middle-aged biochemical matrix of his consciousness into
hyperdrive.

He loved the way the hot desert wind blew the Los Angeles basin clear of smog, perfumed the air with
bougainvillea and chaparral instead of undead hydrocarbons, the technicolor blue daytime skies and the
nights like this oneтАФcrystalline, heated to the temperature of twenty-year-old pussy, redolent with the
musk of the California Dream.

And if the acrid tang of far-off smoke all too often spiced the Santa Ana, well, hey, despite Ellie's
endless urging, Dexter hadn't fallen into the real estate trap, now had he?

As he kept telling her, any writer who sunk his freedom money into a house and a mortgage was a prize
schmuck. And anyone who thought it was a cagey investment to do so in a venue famous for
earthquakes, brushfires, and mud slides, where affordable insurance usually covered everything else but,
deserved what he was sooner or later going to get.

For truth be told, Dexter also loved the Santa Ana just because loving the Devil Wind was somehow a
finger held high in the air to the face of LA.

Not that Dexter hated Los Angeles with the provincial chauvinism of his former Bay Area compatriots,
who believed anything south of the fog-bank they were so cleverly fortunate to have chosen to inhabit
was nothing but Orange County roadside ticky-tacky and braindead airhead yahoos.

Indeed one of the charms of Los Angeles was the very lack of a local equivalent of that smarmy
Northern California boosterism. While the Bay Area brooded endlessly over its supposed rivalry with
La-La Land, people down here were only dimly aware of San Francisco's existence, crappy climate but
great Italian and Chinese restaurants, right, ought to fly up for a three-day weekend sometime, we get a
chance, babes.

The Bay Area took itself far more seriously than anyone else did. LA didn't take itself seriously at all. In