"Wayne Wightman - The Attack Of The Ignoroids" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wightman Wayne)

on juveniles.

I flopped on her black leather sofa. This evening, what with having witnessed a
death by fire, it was hard to focus on that which stood before my eyes -- the
semi-transparent silk poncho she wore and her loose hair that seemed to fly
around her head like weather patterns.

Money was supposed to make life make sense, not make me mental.

"You rented my old house to someone," I called to her. "I was hoping the
neighborhood kids would burn it down. Only way I'll get any money out of it."

She came out of the kitchen with a huge goblet half filled with pale green
slush. A sheet of paper covered the top and she carried it very carefully.

"Here." She held it under my nose and slid off the paper. "Breathe deeply."

I did.

Everything changed. The world brightened. My cares became less world-shaking. I
even managed to notice as she stood with the light behind her that the
blue-black thing she wore was the only thing she wore.

"Gee," I said.

"Nice cold nitrous oxide hovering over vodka-lime slush. Feel better now?"

"Yeah... I could watch people spontaneously combust all day. Okay," I said,
"what is it you said we need to talk about? I assume it's bad news. What's the
worst news you can give me? Do it before this wears off."

She sat beside me and laid her long fingers along the side of my neck. "A few
weeks after you bought the new house, something unusual happened at school. We
have a fundamentalist science teacher there named Tick. He was having his kids
do individual science projects, and one of his Lao-Haitian kids brought in his
grandfather as his project."

I took a few deep breaths of clean air. There seemed to be several serious non
sequiturs in what she was telling me. A fundamentalist Zick? A grandfather
project?

"You're blinking a lot," she said.

"I'm all right. Speak more. If it doesn't all come together in a minute, I'll
let you know."

"Well, in his own brand of English, the old man started telling them that there
was a new disease starting right here in Santa Miranda and that soon it would
affect nearly everyone with some very bad consequences. Zick apparently liked
this news since it fit in with several Biblical verses he always recites about