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

thrown out across the room to the six speaker stacks that made it
look like an enormous sonic slime mold in spawn. Klein himself
knew a few things about stereos, having a system that could
reproduce Bach about as well as the American Megaversity
Chamber Orchestra, and it galled him.
To begin with there was the music. That was bad enough, but
Klein had associated with musical Mau Maus since junior high, and
could inure himself to it in the same way that he kept himself from
jumping up and shouting back at television commercials. It was the
Go Big Red Fan that really got to him. "Okay, okay, let's just accept
as a given that your music is worth playing. Now, even assuming
that, why spend six thousand dollars on a perfect system with no
extraneous noises in it, and then, then, cool it with a noisy fan that


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couldn't fetch six bucks at a fire sale?" Still, Fenrick would ignore
him. "I mean, you amaze me sometimes. You can't think at all, can
you? I mean, you're not even a sentient being, if you look at it
strictly."
When Klein said something like this (I heard the above one
night when going down to the bathroom), Fenrick would look up at
him from his Business textbook, peering over the wall of bright, sto
record-store displays he had erected along the room's centerline;
because his glasses had slipped down his long thin nose, he would
wrinkle it, forcing the lenses toward the desired altitude,
involuntarily baring his canine teeth in the process and causing the
stiff spiky hair atop his head to shift around as though inhabited by a
band of panicked rats.
"You don't understand real meaning," he'd say. "You don't
have a monopsony on meaning. I don't get meaning from books. My
meaning means what it means to me." He would say this, or
something equally twisted, and watch Klein for a reaction. After he
had done it a few times, though, Klein figured out that his roomie
was merely trying to get him all bent out of shapeтАФto freak his
brain, as it wereтАФ and so he would drop it, denying Fenrick the
chance to shriek his vicious laugh and tell the wing that he had
scored again.
Klein was also annoyed by the fact that Fenrick, smoking loads
of parsley-spiked dope while playing his bad music, would forget to
keep an eye on the Go Big Red Fan. Klein, sitting with his back to
the stereo, wads of foam packed in his ears, would abruptly feel the
Fan chunk into the back of his chair, and as he spazzed out in
hysterical surprise it would sit there maliciously grinding away and
transmitting chunka-chunka-chunks into his pelvis like muffled
laughs.
If it was not clear which of them had air rights, they would wage
sonic wars.