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

episode, like that business with the Martian kid—that one looked like the onset of
senility too, except it wasn’t. The kid really can taste the colors of M&Ms.

But maybe this was real too, in a perpendicular kind of way. Maybe, it was
some weird confluence of time and place and dessicated state of mind. Maybe I had
become so isolated from myself that I could finally see what wasn’t actually in front
of me.

See, look, it’s like this. If I’m wrong, then this is just another crazy story from
someone having a bad air day, a story that will be forgotten just as soon as next
month’s issues hit the stands. But maybe something is happening, and if that’s the
case, then I have to say it someplace where there’s a chance of it getting seen by the
right people and where it can’t be so easily erased from history by the wrong. You
know what I mean. Obviously, I’m not going to list that other stuff here, right?

Okay, so if I had been thinking straight, I’d have hopped onto I-5 and been in
Seattle in time for High Tea. But I’d come this far without once having ridden the
Interstates and to tell the truth, it was kinda fun seeing places that still had some
character and personality left; roadside stands selling strawberries picked fresh that
morning, a store with a boardwalk selling live bait, a 120-year old restaurant that still
serves from the original recipes, stuff like that. I even found a gas station in a
time-warp, where an attendant filled the tank for me and wiped the windshield. Well,
it would have been a time-warp, except for the twenty-first century prices. If I’d
have stayed on the Eisenhower Memorial Autobahn, I’d have seen the back ends of
a lot of eighteen wheelers, and a couple hundred identical off ramps. Over here on
the left coast, every off ramp is the same as every other one, the same three gas
stations, the same three fast food chains.

But instead, just a couple blocks short of the on ramp, there was an almost
unnoticeable intersection, a narrow road on the right that stretched away north, at
least I thought it was north, after a while it turned northeast, but it couldn’t have
looked more inviting than if it had been paved with yellow bricks. It looked like an
escape route. And yes, it was the Taco Bell sign directly ahead that convinced me to
turn. When you start thinking Taco Bell is civilization, it’s time to rethink the
concept.

For the first hour or so, it was just me and Camille Saint-Sans, the third
symphony, the one with the runaway organ in the fourth movement—they used it in
that movie about the talking pig, but thank dog those are not the pictures I see in my
head when I listen to this music. I let the car laze along at a convenient forty or fifty
mph, as the road wound its way through the last few ranches close to town, then on
into the higher lands, which had an abandoned and desolate quality. There was no
other traffic on the road—nothing—no one ahead or behind me, and no oncoming
traffic either. I think I saw maybe one other pickup truck on the road, coming the
other way; the driver looked at me as he passed, a mean-looking narrow-eyed stare. I
began to realize there weren’t any signs of life in these lands; no horses or cows or
sheep, only a few crows at first, and then even they seemed unwilling to follow this
track. Even though the sun was still high in the sky, the day had taken on a colorless
cast.