"Allen Steele - A King of Infinite Space" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

the park and smoke the pot they stole from Dad's secret bedroom stash.

It's July 11, 1995, and it's hot all over. The Una-bomber has mailed a deranged screed to the New York
Times and the Washington Post, demanding that Western civilization grind to a halt; Western
civilization yawns and flips to the funny pages. A NASA space shuttle has just returned to Cape
Canaveral after docking with the Russian space station; most people are more interested in catching the
new Tom Hanks movie about another space mission twenty-five years ago. Ten Republicans claim that
they can do a better job of ruining the country than one Democrat, and no one really doubts their word.
Right-wing militia nuts are saying that the United Nations is conspiring to take over the United States,

file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Steele,%20Allen%20-%20[Nea...0of%20Infinite%20Space%20(v0.9)%20[MMQ]%20[html].htm (2 of 263)25-12-2006 0:51:28
 Steele, Allen - [Near-Space 05] - A King of Infinite Space

which is a hoot because UN peacekeepers can't prevent Serbs from wiping out Croats in a plot of
European real estate little larger than Pennsylvania. The major-league baseball strike has been settled,
which means that it's okay to come back to the ballpark and watch your team get stomped by the
Cleveland IndiansтАФpardon me, the Cleveland Native Americans. Richard Gere is in Camelot, Clint
Eastwood is in Meryl Streep's pants, and Denzel Washington is in a sub; Ben Kingsley battles aliens
while Sylvester Stallone fights giant robots, and the best babes in the Cineplex are Batman's new
girlfriend and Disney's idea of how Pocahontas might have looked if she had worked out on a Nautilus
machine and shaved her pits. Calvin talks to Hobbes, Rush talks to Newt, O.J. talks to his lawyers, and
every moron who has worn his wife's clothes, screwed her son's girlfriend, or been kidnapped by aliens
is talking to Oprah, Sally, Geraldo, and/or Ricki. Just between you and me, I'd rather have my brains
fried on the sidewalk and eaten with a poached egg.

As it turned out, fate has other plans for my gray matter. Fate, my father, and a man named Mister
Chicago who hasn't even been born yet, and it begins with a trip out to Riverport for Lolla-palooza.

I leave early from my job at a second-hand record store and return to the Central West End apartment
Erin and I share, a two-bedroom flat furnished with Pier One wicker stuff, cement-block-and-plank
shelves filled with paperbacks and comic books, a queen-sized waterbed, and a life-sized cardboard
figure of Captain Kirk adorned with cheap Mardi Gras beads and an earring in his left ear. We watch
Animaniacs while we roll a few joints and fill our daypacks with bottles of Evian water, sunscreen, spare
rolls of toilet paper (in case some kid throws all the asswipe in the toilets), Tylenol (for heat headaches),
and extra packs of cigarettes. Shemp arrives around about four o'clock, and then we pile into my '93
Saturn SC2 and head for the show. A long summer afternoon of rock 'n' roll with my girl and my best
friend.

I need to tell you about Erin and Shemp.

First, Erin. She's been my girlfriend for the past two years, after we met at the recording studio where
she worked as an office manager when the band Shemp and I belong to, the Belly Bombers, came in to
record our first and only demo. The Bombers never got a label interested in signing us, but Erin came
home with me the night we cut the final track. Shemp was splitting the rent with me at the time, but six
months later he moved out and Erin moved in.

It isn't enough to say that Erin Westphall is a babe. She's outright beautiful: twenty-three years old, very
slim, small-breasted, with chestnut hair that flows down to the center of her back. Chicago's her
hometown, but she moved to St. Louis after graduating from Stephens College in Columbia and kicked
around the city before landing a job at the studio. As with my part-time job at Dino Tracks, she really