"Big U, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

The Big U

By
Neal Stephenson

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---The Go Big Red Fan---
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The Go Big Red Fan was John Wesley Fenrick's, and when
ventilating his System it throbbed and crept along the floor with a
rhythmic chunka-chunka-chunk. Fenrick was a Business major and a
senior. From the talk of my wingmates I gathered that he was smart,
yet crazy, which helped. The description weird was also used, but
admiringly. His roomie, Ephraim Klein of New Jersey, was in
Philosophy. Worse, he was found to be smart and weird and crazy,
intolerably so on all these counts and several others besides.
As for the Fan, it was old and square, with a heavy rounded
design suitable for the Tulsa duplex window that had been its station
before John Wesley Fenrick had brought It out to the Big U with
him. Running up one sky-blue side was a Go Big Red bumper
sticker. When Fenrick ran his SystemЧthat is, bludgeoned the rest
of the wing with a record or tapeЧhe used the Fan to blow air over
the back of the component rack to prevent the electronics from
melting down. Fenrick was tall and spindly, with a turkey-like head
and neck, and all of us in the east corridor of the south wing of the
seventh floor of E Tower knew him for three things: his seventies
rock-'n'-roll souvenir collection, his trove of preposterous electrical
appliances, and his laughЧa screaming hysterical cackle that would
ricochet down the long shiny cinderbiock corridor whenever
something grotesque flashed across the 45-Inch screen of his Video
System or he did something especially humiliating to Ephraim Klein.
Klein was a subdued, intellectual type. He reacted to his
victories with a contented smirk, and this quietness gave some
residents of EO7S East the impression that Fenrick, a roomie-buster
with many a notch on his keychain, had already cornered the young
sage. In fact, Klein beat Fenrick at a rate of perhaps sixty percent, or
whenever he could reduce the conflict to a rational discussion. He
felt that he should be capable of better against a power-punker
Business major, but he was not taking into account the animal
shrewdness that enabled Fenrick to land lucrative oil-company
internships to pay for the modernization of his System.
Inveterate and cynical audio nuts, common at the Big U, would
walk into their room and freeze solid, such was Fenrick's System, its
skyscraping rack of obscure black slabs with no lights, knobs or
switches, the 600-watt Black Hole Hyperspace Energy Nexus Field
Amp that sat alone like the Kaaba, the shielded coaxial cables
thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it