"Larry Niven - The Deadlier Weapon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"Sure."
"Okay."
"What about it?"
"Nothing." I wasn't even trying to smile now.
"All I want is some cash," the hitchhiker explained patiently. "You pull over to the side and stop, and--"
"And you cut my throat and take the car too. The cops get nothing but a missing-person report."
"No, no, no. Honest. All I want--"
"I don't care what you want."
"What do you want? Do you want to live?" Amazing, how his voice had lost those soothing overtones.
I didn't answer. The overpass was closer.
The hitchhiker clamped his lips together, nerving himself to something. Suddenly, snakelike, he reached with the knife. I jerked the wheel, and he pulled back against the door. The wheel damn near jerked out of my hands as we hit gravel. To make it worse, the freeway was curving right. I fought us around, and the bridge was almost on us.
There were no cars near me. Maybe they didn't like the way I drove.
Still the freeway curved right, gently as always. I didn't curve with it. I had the accelerator on the floor, and we went faster and faster, the hitchhiker and the Cadillac and me, edging over onto the gravel. Up ahead, the gravel safety lane ended, and there was the concrete supporting pillar of the bridge, with two red-faceted reflectors shining in the midafternoon sunlight.
I aimed the car right at the reflectors.
My passenger seemed frozen. Only his head moved, swiveling to look at the supporting pillar and then back to my face and then to the pillar and back to me. The pillar was coming up like a cream-colored wall. I was terrified. I made no attempt to hide it. Considering the way the wheel was jumping, trying to pull across the gravel and into the divider fence before we could reach the bridge support, I must have looked like a man wrestling an alligator. There was sweat in my eyes, and at the last moment I whipped the edge of my right hand across my forehead and back to the wheel. Now my hand was dripping wet.
The concrete came at me.
I whipped the wheel hard over, putting my whole body into it. The car slewed, tried to move sideways, tried to roll over. We were going to hit sideways, through the fragile guard rail and into the supporting pillar. Then, with utmost reluctance, the car moved skidding to the right. Suddenly the concrete was behind us. My passenger made a high, whimpering sound.
"Hesitation marks," I gasped. I couldn't get enough air. Reality was a blur. Was I about to faint? I certainly didn't want to faint.
"You're crazy. Crazy!"
I fumbled for a cigarette and managed to get it to my mouth. "There's always hesitation marks. A man shoots himself in the head, you find holes in the wall where he jerked the gun away the first four times. If he cuts his throat you find three or four slashes where he didn't cut deep enough." I was gasping out the words, fighting for air. I had to have air.
"You're out of your mind."
"The thing is, if I have to die, I might as well pick the way I want to go. Right?"
"What are you talking about?"
"I was going to marry a girl."
"Congratulations." If my passenger was trying for sarcasm, it didn't come through. He only sounded scared. He sat facing straight toward me, with one leg on the seat and his back hard up against the door, watching.
"Thanks. Thanks a whole hell of a lot. Only she decided I wasn't her type. She-- she tried to tell me we'd both known it all along. We'd just been fooling ourselves, she said. Liar."
"They do that," said my passenger.
"Everybody does that. You know how my dad told me he and Mom were getting divorced?" My cigarette was still in my mouth, unlit. I reached and stabbed at the car lighter. "I was fifteen. They called me into the living room and--"
"I don't care what your father told you when you were fifteen!"
"I do. My dad walked a few times around the room and then finally he said, 'I suppose you know your mother and I are separated.' Liar. They'd kept it from me because they thought it might interfere with my finals at school."
All I saw of him, I saw with the corner of my eye. But I saw him start to say something, stop, close his eyes tight to think.
The lighter popped out.
He blurted, "You're crazy! You can't kill yourself just because some bitch gives you the shaft!"
I pulled the lighter out and reached across the seat to touch it to the tip of his nose. He never moved to stop me. He couldn't believe what I was doing, not until he actually felt the heat. Then he screamed and threw his arms over his face. He missed grabbing my arm because I'd already pulled it back and was lighting my cigarette.
"She's not a bitch," I told him. "And if she was, you wouldn't be the one to say it. Keep your dirty mouth off her."
"Let me off," said the hitchhiker. He'd forgotten he had the knife. He'd tried it before and it hadn't worked.
"Why should I?"
"I never tried to kill you. It's not fair."
"Who said anything about fair?" My grin felt natural now. After all, we were even. The blood on my neck matched the burn on his nose.
"Look, you don't want to kill yourself. You don't want to die. You're just kidding yourself. Just wait. Just wait until tomorrow. You'll feel different, really you will. I've felt like that myself, I really have but it always went away, sometimes it lasted for days but it always--"
"It's too late."
"It's not too late! You're still alive!"
"This isn't my car."
"What?"
"Do I look like a Cadillac driver?"
Eyes see what they're trained to see, what they expect to see. A polo shirt is just a T-shirt with a collar, except for the material. Pants are pants, except to the guy who wears them. He knows if they bind, or if they're too loose, or if they're tailored to fit just right. If the seat looks shiny, then they're too old, but how can you tell when he's sitting down?
"You stole it," he said.
I bobbed my head a couple of times, jerkily.
"Let me out."
"I don't want to get knifed."