"John Varley - Press Enter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

seemed to be having a good time. Twice crews knocked on my door, but
I didn't answer. Eventually they went away.
I ran a hot bath and soaked in it for about an hour. Then I turned the
heat up as high as it would go and got in bed, under the blankets.
I shivered all night.
*#*
 Osborne came over about nine the next morning. I let him in, Hai
followed, looking very unhappy. I realized they had been up all night. I
poured coffee for them.
"You'd better read this first," Osborne said, and handed me the sheet
of computer printout. I unfolded it, got out my glasses, and started to
read.
It was in that awful dot-matrix printing. My policy is to throw any such
trash into the fireplace, un-read, but I made an exception this time.
It was Kluge's will. Some probate court was going to have a lot of fun
with it.
He stated again that he didn't exist, so he could have no relatives. He
had decided to give all his worldly property to somebody who deserved
it.
But who was deserving? Kluge wondered. Well, not Mr. and Mrs.
Perkins, four houses down the street. They were child abusers. He cited
court records in Buffalo and Miami, and a pending case locally.
Mrs. Radnor and Mrs. Polonski, who lived across the street from each
other five houses down, were gossips.
The Andersons' oldest son was a car thief.
Marian Flores cheated on her high school algebra tests.
There was a guy nearby who was diddling the city on a freeway
construction project. There was one wife in the neighborhood who made
out with door-to-door salesmen, and two having affairs with men other
than their husbands. There was a teenage boy who got his girlfriend
pregnant, dropped her, and bragged about it to his friends.
There were no fewer than nineteen couples in the immediate area who
had not reported income to the IRS, or who had padded their deductions.
Kluge's neighbors in back had a dog that barked all night.
Well, I could vouch for the dog. He'd kept me awake often enough. But
the rest of it was crazy! For one thing, where did a guy with two hundred
gallons of illegal narcotics get the right to judge his neighbors so harshly? I
mean, the child abusers were one thing, but was it right to tar a whole
family because their son stole cars? And for anotherтАж how did he know
some of this stuff?
But there was more. Specifically, four philandering husbands. One was
Harold "Hal" Lanier, who for three years had been seeing a woman named
Toni Jones, a co-worker at the L.A.P.D. Data Processing facility. She was
pressuring him for a divorce; he was "waiting for the right time to tell his
wife."
I glanced up at Hal. His red face was all the confirmation I needed.
Then it hit me. What had Kluge found out about me?
I hurried down the page, searching for my name. I found it in the last
paragraph.
"тАж for thirty years Mr. Apfel has been paying for a mistake he did not