"Frankowski,.Leo.-.Conrad.Starguard.7.-.Conrad's.Time.Machine" - читать интересную книгу автора (Frankowski Leo)

naturally pointed west, which was fine. There isn't much east of
Massachusetts that you can get to on a bike.

Well. My motorcycle was paid for. My savings and accumulated
leave added up to just under $2,000.00. It was springtime and
figured I could live for six months without the need to reconnect
myself to society. Then, maybe I'd go back and finish my degree.
Or maybe not.

The Mass Pike dumped me onto the New York Thruway and a
green-and-white sign read "Rochester—231 Miles."

That got me thinking about Jim Hasenpfeffer, since he was working
on his Ph.D. at the University of Rochester and this naturally got
me thinking about Ian McTavish as well.
CHAPTER TWO
An Old Friend

Actually, we never did have much in common.

Take religion.

Now, I was a defrocked altar boy whose convictions varied
between my normal atheism to militant Agnosticism when I'm
argued into a corner. Militant agnostics say that they don't know
anything about God, and you don't either, dammit!

Ian was sort of conventional about religion. He always went to
church on Sunday, but he never much talked about it. I think he was
about the only Christian I'd ever met who was capable of being
polite about religion. Or at least he was always annoyingly polite
with me.

And nobody ever had the slightest idea of what—if
anything—Hasenpfeffer believed in. He had this talent for
sidestepping whatever he felt wouldn't be personally rewarding.

Or take women.

I always tried like hell, but never got anywhere with them. Or even
when I did score, they usually didn't want to see me again the next
day.

I'm pretty sure that Ian knew that women were necessary for the
continuation of the species, but he acted as though they were
something that a rational man shouldn't waste his time on.

Like, once I brought these two girls home because I didn't know
what else to do with them. They'd been hitchhiking in Detroit, a
profoundly unsafe procedure. They were very young, very pretty,