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

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, and very stoned on God knew what. Ian was
sitting in an easy chair, reading myScientific American , when one of them
latched onto his leg. She was kneeling at his feet, babbling something about
running barefoot through the forest together, and sliding down rainbows.
Ian looked down from his article, said "Rainbows lack structural integrity," and
went back to reading. He wasn't queer. Just sort of indifferent.
Hasenpfeffer always seemed to have a woman within arm's reach. Even baching it
with us, I don't think he ever slept alone. They seemed to follow him like flies
going after shit.
Or, take politics.
Back then, I was an awfully liberal Libertarian and Ian was a conservative
Republican. I'm not sure, but I think Hasenpfeffer was pretty left wing.
Or take partying. I like to drink and sing a lot. Ian was an absolute teetotaler
about all drugs beyond coffee. And Hasenpfeffer did moderate amounts
ofeverything .
Or take sports. Or hobbies. Or damn nearly anything.
Hell, I'm six foot six and Ian was five one with his elevator shoes on.
Yet when we met in the freshman registration line at U of M, we hit it off
pretty quick. Hasenpfeffer had found this huge three-bedroom apartment and was
looking for two people to share expenses.


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We moved in that day. Oh, it was a fourth-floor walkup and the six-foot ceilings
were—for me—an absolute pain, but it was cheap and that was the deciding factor.
None of us had a family to fall back on for money.
I guess we did have something in common. We were all orphans.
Ian pulled a straight four point and had no difficulty in keeping his church
scholarship. Hasenpfeffer had this talent for pulling dollars out of all sorts
of organizations. But I was only an average student and I wasn't much good at
filling out forms and begging.
I'd used up a small inheritance by the end of my junior year, and joining the
Air Farce seemed like a better shot than getting drafted into the Army. They put
me through a year of electronics school and then had me spend three years
pretending to fix computers under this mountain in Massachusetts. They'd never
even let me ride on a military airplane. . . .
Towards sunset, looking up old friends seemed like a good idea, and my bike made
a right turn into Rochester, a strange little town.
The locals claim that the engineer who laid out the street plan was drunk for
eight weeks before he drew the first line, but I knew better. It takes large