"Wilson-ToTheVectorBelong" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robin)

cash register and the soft susurrus sung by all old industrial buildings.

"What do you suppose was the problem?" prompts Lindstrom again.

"Jesus, you study your ass off," says the alien, who speaks an amazingly fluent
American English with no accent. "Master two, three languages right down to the
last idiot, pick up on gestures and folkways and history and culture, and then
it's something dumb like the goddamn packaging that can give you away."

"Idiom, Al. Not idiot," says Lindstrom, who has raised children and corrected
them and whose fascination with the young man is only a little tempered by his
fatigue. He is also a little worried that his involvement in this case will
bring him too much exposure. He has all his life thrived on anonymity, living a
fresh cover story with nearly every new assignment, and because of his frequent
posting from one bureau in Justice to another, his hold on a federal pension is
not as firm as he might wish. Bureaucrats achieving notoriety are invariably
punished one way or another by their bureaus.

"Id-i-om," chants Al mechanically, his young man's mind still engaged by the
excitement of his perilous passage. "We got miles of tape and film and even
aerosols the remotes collected so's we'd get the smells right and know a fart
from a flower and by God we learned it all to about point nine nine nine, and
then it's the goddamn packaging or something else indigenous that's equally dumb
that you gotta do right. We could handle most of it in training, I mean, like
the first pop-top beer can. I had practice with the damn thing at the academy
although my hands, you know, when I first got there my hands were a little weak
from the amputations, but I could handle it.

"And I could deal with a bunch of coat hangers, which aren't exactly packaging,
but just about as big a pain in the ass to someone who's never seen one before.
But boy, the shrink pack stuff, until you know it's supposed to be broken you
can spend a hell of a time poking around, trying to find the tear strip or
button or pry point or whatever, trying not to let on to anyone that you
haven't, you know, opened a million of the things, and screw up the whole
tamale."

He stops abruptly and drains his glass, setting it back on the bar with a clink
and shaking his head, aware suddenly of his own volubility. "But then none of it
mattered." He pauses to examine his empty glass, puzzled. "This is an overt
penetration and I guess I could of showed up dressed in ergli-chicken feathers
with a bone in my nose and it wouldn't have made any difference."

"Not tamale," says Lindstrom. "Enchilada. It's an idiom from the Watergate
affair thirty years ago, back in the seventies. The whole enchilada."

"Yeah, we read about that." Then, chanting: "The whole en-chil-ad-a" to
Lindstrom's nod of approval.

"Okay, Al," says Lindstrom, picking up on Al's confusion about his preparation.
"Why such elaborate training? How come all the preparation so you could pass for