"Harlan Ellison - Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

After a moment’s hesitation he reached for the jacket. The garment slid away from him. “Try to catch me!” it
said, in a coy, insipid voice. Pareti grabbed for it, but the jacket danced away from him.
Pareti stared at it. Wires? Magnets? A joke of the management of the Hotel? He knew instinctively that he
would find no rational way in which the coat had moved and talked. He gritted his teeth and stalked it.
The jacket moved away, laughing, dipping like a bat. Pareti cornered it behind the room’s massage unit, and
managed to grab a sleeve. I’ve got to have this goddam thing sent out to be cleaned and burned, he thought insanely.
It lay limp for a moment. Then it curled around and tickled the palm of his hand.
Pareti giggled involuntarily, then flung the garment away from him and hurried out of the room.
Descending by dropshaft to the street, he knew that had been the true onset of the Disease. It had altered the
relationship between him and an article of clothing. An inanimate object. The goo was getting bolder.
What would it do next? He was in a soft place called The Soft Place. It was a gambling hall whose
innovation was an elaborate game called Stick It. The game was played by seating oneself before a long counter with a
round polyethylene-lined hole in the facing panel, and inserting a certain portion of the anatomy therein. It was
strictly a man’s game, of course.
One placed one’s bets on the flickering light-panels that covered the counter-top. These lights were changed
in a random pattern by a computer programmer, and through the intricacies of the betting and odds, various things
happened behind the facing panels, to whomever happened to be inserted in the playing-hole. Some of the things
were very nice indeed. Some were not.
Ten seats down to his right, Pareti heard a man scream, high and shrill, like a woman. An attendant in white
came with a sheet and a pneumatic stretcher, and took the bettor away. The man to Pareti’s left was sitting forward,
up tight against the panel, moaning with pleasure. His amber WINNER light was flashing.
A tall, elegant woman with inky hair came up beside Pareti’s chair. “Honey, you shouldn’t be wasting
anything as nice as you here. Why don’t we go downshaft to my brig and squam a little...”
Pareti panicked. He knew the goo was at work again. He withdrew from the panel just as the flickering
lights went up LOSER in front of him, and the distinct sound of whirring razor blades came out of the playing-hole.
He saw his bets sucked into the board, and he turned without looking at the woman, knowing she would be the most
gorgeous creature he had ever seen. And he didn’t need that aggravation on top of everything else.
He ran out of The Soft Place. The goo, and Ashton’s Disease, were ruining his good time of hell-for-leather.
But he was not, repeat, not going to let it get the better of him. Behind him, the woman was crying.

He was hurrying, but he didn’t know where he was going. Fear encased him like a second self. The thing he
ran from was within him, pulsing and growing within him, running with him, perhaps moving out ahead of him. But
the empty ritual of flight calmed him, left him better able to think.
He sat down on a park bench beneath an obscenely-shaped purple lamp post. The neon designs were gagging
and suggestive. It was quiet here--except for the Muzak--he was in the world-famous Hangover Square. He could
hear nothing--except the Muzak--and the stifled moans of a tourist expiring in the bushes.
What could he do? He could resist, he could close out the effects of Ashton’s Disease by concentration...
A newspaper fluttered across the street and plastered itself around his foot. Pareti tried to kick it away. It
clung to his foot, and he heard it whisper, “Please, oh please do not spurn me.”
“Get away from me!” Pareti screamed. He was suddenly terrified; he could see the newspaper crinkle as it
tried to unsnap his shoe-buttons.
“I want to kiss your feet,” the newspaper pleaded. “Is that so terrible? Is it wrong? Am I so ugly?”
“Let go!” Pareti shouted, tugging at the paper, which had formed into a pair of giant white lips.
A man walked past him, stopped, stared, and said, “Jim, that’s the damnedest bit I ever saw. You do that as a
lounge act or just for kicks?”
“Voyeur!” the newspaper hissed, and fluttered away down the street.
“How do you control it?” the man asked. “Special controls in your pocket or something?”
Pareti shook his head numbly. He was so tired suddenly. He said, “You actually saw it kiss my foot?”
“I mean to tell you I saw it,” the man said.
“I hoped that maybe I was only hallucinating,” Pareti said. He got up from the bench and walked unsteadily