"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Inferno" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

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INFERNO
by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

(c) 1976 by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle

v1.0 (12-31-1998)

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CHAPTER 1

I thought about being dead.

I could remember every silly detail of that silly last performance. I was dead at the end of it.
But how could I think about being dead if I had died?

I thought about that, too, after I stopped having hysterics. There was plenty of time to think.

Call me Allen Carpentier. It's the name I wrote under, and someone will remember it. I was one of
the best-known science-fiction writers in the world, and I had a lot of fans. My stories weren't
the kind that win awards, but they entertained, and I had written a lot of them. The fans all knew
me. Someone ought to remember me.

It was the fans who killed me. At least, they let me do it. It's an old game. At science-fiction
conventions the fans try to get their favorite author washed-out stinking drunk. Then they can go
home and tell stories about how Allen Carpentier really tied one on and they were right there to
see it. They add to the stories until legends are built around what writers do at conventions.
It's all in fun. They really like me, and I like them.

I think I do. But the fans vote the Hugo awards, and you have to be popular to win. I'd been
nominated five times for awards and never won one, and I was out to make friends that year.
Instead of hiding in a back booth with other writers I was at a fan party, drinking with a roomful
of short ugly kids with pimples, tall serious Harvard types, girls with long stringy hair, half-
pretty girls half-dressed to show it, and damn few people with good manners.

Remember the drinking party in War and Peace? Where one of the characters bets he can sit on a
window ledge and drink a whole bottle of rum without touching the sides? I made the same bet...

The convention hotel was a big one, and the room was eight stories up. I climbed out and sat with
my feet dangling against the smooth stone building. The smog had blown away, and Los Angeles was
beautiful. Even with the energy shortage there were lights everywhere, moving rivers of lights on
the freeways, blue glows from swimming pools near the hotel, a grid of light stretching out as far
as I could see. Somewhere out there were fireworks, but I don't know what they were celebrating.

They handed me the rum. "You're a real sport, Allen," said a middle-aged adolescent. He had acne