"James Patrick Kelly - Fruitcake Theory" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kelly James Patrick)

It happens so fast. Santa comes from somewhere behind
the followers. No one sees him until he goes airborne.
He’s spry for an old man, clipping Kasaan at the waist
and spinning him around. The eggs go flying out of my
hand and splatter on the floor. Santa and the scarecrow
fall in a heap.
"Monster!" screams Santa. "Get out of my mall!" He’s got
his hands around the scarecrow’s neck. We swarm over to
pull them apart but we’re a millisecond too late.
Kasaan bites down hard on Santa’s bicep. She tears off a
mouthful of muscle and some red felt rags. Perhaps it’s
instinct that makes her swallow.
"Ahhh!" Blood spurts. Santa faints.
The scarecrow picks herself up slowly, licking the blood
off her lips.
"Kasaan, I am so sorry," says Balfour, her voice muffled
by the gas mask. "I thought we had secured the area."
Kasaan stares thoughtfully at her. "He is a senior."
"Old, yes," she says. "Poor thing probably doesn’t know
what he’s doing."
"This is how you treat your elders?"
"What do you mean?"
"We have made a terrible mistake," says Kasaan. "I wish
to return to the ship immediately."
=And a happy New Year,= says the rooster, as he follows
the scarecrow out.
Three days later, the Kuvat starship takes off. They
have yet to return.
Barbara Balfour, Undersecretary of Alien Affairs,
resigns in February, after taking a merciless pounding
in the media and both houses of Congress. In March she
signs a contract to write Who Lost the Kuvat?, which
presents her side of what happened. Although sales are
disappointing, the vein in her temple stops throbbing.
Bjorn Lipponen loses one hundred and fifty pounds in six
months. Two years after The Incident, as it comes to be
called, he is named one of the twenty-first century’s
Hundred Most Sexy Men. Later, he becomes a noted
futurist. His book, The Road to Eternity, is in its
eighteenth printing.
Nobody knows quite what to do with Lester Rand, the
demented Santa. There is considerable sentiment for
charging him in the World Court with crimes against
humanity. But who can say what will happen if the Kuvat
come back and find out that we punished the messenger
instead of accepting the message? In his later years, he
writes a children’s book, Reindeer in the Mall, which is
optioned by Fox and made into a full length computer
animated cartoon.
I am never going to write a book. I’m not going to live