"Theodore Sturgeon - Venus Plus X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sturgeon Theodore)

Utterly aside from the subject matter

To

GERTRUDE and her Isaac

VENUS PLUS X

A PYRAMID BOOK

First Printing, September 1960 Second printing. May 1962 Third printing,
March 1968 Fourth printing, December 1969 Fifth printing, July 1971

This book is fiction. No resemblance is intended between any character herein
and any person, living or dead; any such resemblance is purely coincidental.

Copyright, ┬й 1960, by Theodore Sturgeon All Rights Reserved Printed in Canada

PYRAMID BOOKS are published by Pyramid Publications

A Division of Pyramid Communications, Inc.

444 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10022, U.S.A.

\\ff*

CHARLIE JOHNS," URGENTLY

cried Charlie Johns: "Charlie Johns, Charlie Johns!" for that was the absolute
necessityтАФto know who Charlie Johns was, not to let go of that for a second,
for anything, ever.

"I am Charlie Johns," he said argumentatively, and plaintively, he said it
again. No one argued, no one denied it. He lay in the warm dark with his knees
drawn up and his arms crossed and his forehead pressed tight against his
kneecaps. He saw dull flickering red, but that was inside his eyelids, and he
was Charlie Johns.

C, Johns once stencilled on a foot-locker, written in speed-ball black-letter
on a high-school diploma, typed on a pay-check. Johns, Chas. in the telephone
book.

The name, all right. All right, fine, okay, but a man is more than a name. A
man is twenty-seven years old, he sees the hairline just so in his morning
mirror and likes a drop of Tabasco on his eggs (over light: whites firm, yolks
runny). He was born with one malformed toe and a strabismus. He can cook a
steak drive a car love a girl run a mimeograph go to the bathroom brush his
teeth, including the permanent bridge, left upper lateral incisor and
bicuspid. He left the house in plenty of time but he is going to be late to
work.