"Norman Spinrad - Journals of the Plague Years 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

bankroll and kept it in bills. The day before I was to report for my ID update,
I got in my car to go to school, said the usual goodbye to my parents, and took
off, headed south.
 South to Santa Cruz. South to L.A. South to anywhere. Out along the
broad highway to see what there was to see of California, of what was left of
America, out along the broad highway toward the eventual inevitable--crazed,
confused, terror-stricken, brave with fatal knowledge, determined only to have a
long hot run till my time ran out.

DR. RICHARD BRUNO

They used to call it midlife crisis, male menopause, the seven-year itch,
back when it wasn't a condition to which you were condemned for life at birth.
I was just about to turn forty. I had dim teenage memories of quite a
meaty little sex life back at the beginning of the Ugly Eighties, before the
Plague, before I married Marge. Oh yes, I had been quite a hot little cocksman
before it all fell apart, a child of the last half-generation of the Sexual
Revolution.
When I was Tod's age, fifteen, I had already had more real meat than the
poor frustrated little guy was likely to get in his whole life. Now I had to
watch my own son sneaking around to sleazy sex parlors to stick it into sex
machines, and don't think I was above it myself from time to time.
Marge, well . . .
Marge was five years younger than I. Just young enough to never have
known what the real thing was like, young enough to remember nothing but condoms
and vaginal dams and the early interfaces. Oh yes, we had meat together in the
early years, before it finally resulted in Tod. Poor Marge was terrified the
whole time, unable to come. After Tod was born, she got herself an interface,
and never made love again without it.
Marge still loved me, I think, and I still loved her, but the Plague Years
had dried her up sexually, turned her prudish and sour. She wouldn't even let
me buy Tod an interface so he could get it from a real girl, if only secondhand.
His sixteenth birthday is more than time enough, she insisted shrilly everytime
we fought about it, which was frequently.
Naturally, or perhaps more accurately unnaturally, all my libidinal
energies had long since been channeled into my work. It was the perfect
sublimation.
I was a genetic synthesizer for the Sutcliffe Corporation in Palo Alto. I
had already designed five different Plague vaccines for Sutcliffe that made them
hundreds of millions each before the virus mutated into immunity. I was the
fair-haired boy. I got many bonuses. I had my own private lab with little
restraint on my budget. For a scientist, it should have been heaven.
It wasn't.
It was maddening. A new Plague strain would appear and rise to dominance.
I'd strip off the antigen coat, clone it, insert its genome in a bacterium, and
Sutcliffe would market a vaccine to those who could afford it, make hundreds of
millions in six months. Then the next immune strain would appear, and it would
be back to square one. I felt like a scientific Sisyphus, rolling the dead
weight of the Plague uphill, only to have it roll back and crush my hopes every
six months.