"Нейл Стефенсон. The Big U (Большое "U", англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

minute, for various reasons, and so I'd spent ten days sitting there in my
bicycling shorts, drinking beer, typing, and sweating monumentally in the
fetid Plex air. So my first exposure to the Plex and its people really came
that afternoon, when I wandered out into the elevator lobby and punched the
buttons. The desperate Tylenol-charged throngs in the elevators did not budge
when the doors opened, because they couldn't. They stared at me as though I
were Son of Godzilla, which I was used to, and I stared at them and tried to
figure out how they got that way, and the doors clunked shut. I discovered the
stairways, and once I got below the bottom of the tower and into the lower
levels, I also found that I was locked in.

For fifteen minutes I followed dimly lit stairs and corridors smelling of
graffiti solvent and superfluous floor wax, helplessly following the paths
that students would take if the Plex ever had to be evacuated. Through little
windows in the locked doors I peered out of this twilight zone and into the
different zones of the Plex-- Cafeteria, Union, gymnasia, offices-- but my
only choice was to follow the corridors, knowing they would dump me into the
ghetto outside. At last I turned a corner and saw the wall glistening with
noisy grey outside light. At the end of the line, a metal door swung silently
in the breeze, emblazoned thus: FIRE ESCAPE ONLY. WARNING-- ALARM WILL SOUND.

I stepped out the door and looked down along, steep slope into the canyon of
the Turnpike.

The American Megaversity Campustructure was three blocks on a side, and
squatted between the Megalopolitan Turnpike on the north and the Ronald Reagan
Parkway on the south. Megaversity Stadium, the only campus building not inside
the Plex proper, was to the west, and on the east was an elaborate multilevel
interchange interconnecting the Pike, the Parkway, the Plex and University
Avenue. The Pike ran well below the base of the Plex, and so as I emerged from
the north wall of the building I found myself atop a high embankment. Below me
the semis and the Audis shot past through the layered blue monoxide, and their
noises blended into a waterfall against the unyielding Plex wall. Aside from
a few wretched weeds growing from cracks in the embankment, no life was to be
seen, except for Casimir Radon.

He had just emerged from another emergency exit. We saw each other from a
hundred feet apart, waved and walked toward each other. As we converged,
I regarded a tall and very thin man with an angular face and a dense
five-o'clock shadow. He wore round rimless glasses. His black hair was in
disarray as usual; during the year it was to vary almost randomly between
close-cropped and shoulder-length. I soon observed that Casimir could grow a
shadow before lunch, and a beard in three days. He and I were the same age,
though I was a recent Ph.D. and he a junior.

Later I was to think it remarkable that Casimir and I should emerge from those
fire doors at nearly the same moment, and meet. On reflection I have changed
my mind. The Big U was an unnatural environment, a work of the human mind, not
of God or plate tectonics. If two strangers met in the rarely used stairways,
it was not unreasonable that they should turn out to be similar, and become