"David Gerrold - [SS] The Equally Strange Reappearance of David Gerrold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

Ernie, on the other hand, is tall and lanky. He didn’t look like he had enough
meat on his bones to be a decent meal for the buzzards that might end up picking at
our corpses; but he remained indefatigable and he carried a backpack nearly half his
weight, filled with some of the most remarkable surprises. Ernie is also a wealth of
astonishingly esoteric facts, the end result of all those days spent surfing the web.
Ask him about porn sometime. He has the evidence to prove that several of those
anatomical impossibilities we speculated upon in adolescence aren’t really
impossible after all. He gave me the URLs where I can see the actual photographs.
(I’ll send those later in a separate e-mail, after I check them out myself. The one
about the ladies with multiple breasts sounds promising. My guess is that it’s all
done with Photoshop, but who knows anymore?)
Bert and Ernie are a very odd pair. Where Bert is skeptical, Ernie is
enthusiastic—overabundantly so; often to the point where if I were a less patient
man, I might have been tempted to inflict bodily harm on him. Nobody is that happy
all the time. You want to talk about chemical imbalances...? Start with Ernie. On the
other hand, I have to admit, I wish I could bring that kind of unfailing, unflappable
enthusiasm to life.
Ernie is also an incorrigible punster. I tried not to incorrige him, but he’s a
self-starter; more evidence that the shortest distance between two puns is a straight
line. Obviously, at some point, he’d been seduced by the dork side of the farce.
And in case I hadn’t mentioned, Ernie is as black as the space of Hades. And that
should give you some idea of what Bert and I had to put up with for the better part
of a week. (Someday soon I’m going to lock Ernie into a room with Spider
Robinson and Esther Friesner and see which one of them survives. That is, if the
universe doesn’t implode first. Not with a bang, but a whimper of whipped gods.)
We drove down through Oregon, down into California, to that place I told
you about near the Lassen National Forest. I won’t be more specific about the
location, although it doesn’t really matter anymore. You’ll see why shortly. We
drove the better part of the day and finally arrived in mid-afternoon. Coming in from
the north, we didn’t see any signs identifying this area as a private hunting club, but I
recognized the barbed wire fences; there was nothing like them anywhere else in the
area. Driving slowly south, we also found the place where I’d cut the green boy
loose from the barbed wire. The broken wire was still hanging loose. I didn’t know if
that was a good sign or bad.
Then we drove on until we reached the field of red boulders at the bottom end
of the private hunting preserve. Our driver let us off—it took less than thirty seconds
for us to pull our gear out after us—and then he sped off in the van. Without much
talk, we cut our way through the barbed wire. Remember, I told you about the sign
that said it was a Private Hunting Preserve? Well, the sign was gone now, but the
place where it had been was our starting point. It had been posted high on one of the
trees, and there was still a faded spot on the bark. So we made that our southern
landmark.
We cut our way into the field just where the trees began and vanished into
them as quickly as we could. The ground was rocky, but not impassable, and we
had to watch our step carefully. I hadn’t yet broken in my new hiking boots, but I
was wearing three pairs of thick socks and had blister pads taped to my heels, so I
wasn’t in too much pain.
That first afternoon, we didn’t see much—a single jackrabbit, no deer, no
bears. And that probably saved Ernie’s life, because there are a lot of things you can
do with words like deer and bear, most of which he didn’t have the chance to.