"Bradley Denton - Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede" - читать интересную книгу автора (Denton Bradley)

please get in touch with that fellow for me? Thanks."

I began applauding, scattering popcorn all over the room. "Yes!" I shouted. "Oliver, you impress me!
Inflated self-esteem is a major breakthrough! Sharon Sharpston will be most pleased as she ships you off
to the state hospital at Osawatomie!"

Buddy took a few steps back from the camera and shifted the Strat into playing position. "That's all the
sign says, but I'll repeat the address in a while in case nobody's listening right now." He looked up and
around, as if watching an airplane cross the sky. "Seems like I'm in a big glass bubble, and I can't tell
where the light's coming from. It's a little chilly, and I sure hope I don't have to be here long. In the
meantime, here's one for your family audience, Mr. Sullivan." He struck a hard chord and began singing
"Oh, Boy!" in a wild shout.

I remote-controlled the Sony into blank-screened silence. Poor Buddy. He had seemed to be
surrounded by nothing worse than stars and shadows, but I remembered enough from my Introductory
Astronomy course to know better. Ganymede was an immense ice ball strewn with occasional patches of
meteoric rock, and its surface was constantly bombarded by vicious streams of protons and other cosmic
crap whipped up by Jupiter's hyperactive magnetic field. It was no place for a picker from Lubbock.

The cordless Hitachi telephone on the coffee table blooped. Wondering who could be calling at this time
of night, I leaned forward and picked up the receiver before the built-in answering machine could
interrupt. "Oliver Vale, Electronic Appliance Salesman and Messiah," I said. I thought that was terrifically
witty, which goes to show the state of mind I was in.

"Oliver, what are you trying to pull?" The voice was female. I had parted from my long-term
Relationship, Julie "Eat shit and die, Oliver" Calloway, a month before, so this had to be Sharon
Sharpston.

"Is that a Freudian question?" I asked.

"This isn't funny," she said. It was the first time I had ever heard her sound angry, and it startled me. "At
first I thought you were only playing a trick onme, but WIBW radio just said that the TV interruption is
statewide, and maybe even nationwide. Didn't you stop to think that it was against the law?"

Deep inside the damp caverns of my brain, I realized that what she was saying could only mean that
what I had seen on the Sony had not been the product of my fruit-looped imagination after all. Primarily,
though, I was perplexed by the bizarre thought that a humanistic individual like Sharon might be a John
Wayne fan. "Were you trying to watchThe Searchers too?" I asked.

"What are you talking about? Bruce and I were looking at a tape of Olympic highlights when the VCR
shut down and Buddy Holly showed up on the screen. Who else but you would choosethat figure as
your video persona? How did you do it, anyway? More importantly,why did you do it? I mean, why do
youthink you did it?"

Bruce Werter was Sharon's person-of-opposite-sex-sharing-living-quarters, a young partner in a
downtown Topeka law firm. I had first met him two years ago when he'd come to pick up Sharon after a
group therapy session held at my house. He'd had one brown eyebrow and one blond, and not much else
to recommend him as far as I could see. He had shown no appreciation for my collection of classic rock
'n' roll recordings, but he had clapped me on the shoulder and told me to "hang in there and whip those
mental difficulties." I had wanted to take up voodoo so that I could make a doll of him and stick pins in it.