"Niven, Larry - Flash Crowd" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

As for the telephone stock, people still made long-distance calls. They tended to phone first before they went visiting. They would give out a phone-booth number, whereas they would not give out a displacementbooth number.
The airlines survived, somehow, but they paid rock-bottom dividends. Barry Jerome Jansen grew up poor in the midst of a boom period. His father hated the displacement booths but used them, because there was nothing else.
Jerryberry accepted that irrational hatred as part of his father’s personality. He did not share it. He hardly noticed the displacement booths. They were part of the background. The displacement booths were the most important part of a newstaper’s life, and still he hardly noticed their existence.
Until the day they turned on him.



4

In the morning there were messages stored in his phone. He heard them out over breakfast.
Half a dozen news services and tapezines wanted exclusives on the riot. One call was from Bailey at C.B.A. The price had gone up to four thousand. The others did not mention price, but one was from Playboy.
That gave him furiously to think. Playboy paid high, and they liked unpopular causes.
Three people wanted to murder him. On two of them the teevee was blanked. The third was a graying dowdy woman, all fat and hate and disappointed hopes, who showed him a kitchen knife and started to tell him what she wanted to do with it. Jerrybeny cut her off, shuddering. He wondered if any of them could possibly get hold of his displacement-booth number.
There was a check in the mail. Severance pay and bonuses from C .B .A. So that was that.
He was setting the dishes in the dishwasher when the phone rang. He hesitated, then decided to answer.
It was Janice Wolfe—a pretty oval face, brown eyes, a crown of long, wavy, soft brown hair—and not an anonymous killer. She lost her smile as she saw him. “You look grim. Could you use some cheering up?”
“Yes!” Jerryberry said fervently. “Come on over. Apartment six, booth number—”
“I live here, remember?”
He laughed. He’d forgotten. You got used to people living anywhere and everywhere. George Bailey lived in Nevada; he commuted to work every morning in three flicks, using the long-distance displacement booths at Las Vegas and Los Angeles International Airports.
Those long-distance booths had saved the airlines—after his father had dribbled away most of his stocks to feed his family. They had been operating only two years. And come to think of it— Doorbell.
Over coffee he told Janice about the riot. She listened sympathetically, asking occasional questions to draw him out. At first Jerrybeny tried to talk entertainingly, until he realized, first, that she wasn’t indulging in a spectator sport, and second, that she knew all about the riot already.
She knew he’d been fired, too. “That’s why I called. They put it on the morning news,” she told him.
“It figures.”
“What are you going to do now?”
“Get drunk. Alone if! have to. Would you like to spend a lost weekend with me?”
She hesitated. “You’ll be bitter.”
“Yah, I probably will. Not fit to live with. .. . Hey, Janice. Do you know anything about how the long-distance displacement booths work?”
“No. Should I?”
“The mall riot couldn’t have happened without the long-distance booths. That damn Wash Evans might at least have mentioned the fact. . . except that I only just thought of it myself. Funny. There hasn’t ever been a riot that happened that quick.”
“I’ll come with you,” Janice decided.
“What? Good.”
“You don’t start drinking this early in the morning, do you?”
“I guess not. Are you free today?”
“Every day, during summer. I teach school.”
“Oh. So what’ll we do? San Diego Zoo?” he suggested at random.
“Sounds like fun.”
They made no move to get up. It felt peaceful in Jerrybeny’s tiny kitchen nook. There was still coffee.
“You could get a bad opinion of me this way. I feel like tearing things up.”
“Go ahead.”
mean it:
“Me, too,” she said serenely. “You need to tear things up. Fine, go ahead. After that you can try to put your life back together.”
“Just what kind of school do you teach?”
Janice laughed. “Fifth grade.”
There was quiet.
“You know what the punch line is? Wash Evans wants to interview me! After that speech he made!”
“That sounds like a good idea,” she said surprisingly. “Gives you a chance to give your side of the story. You didn’t really cause the mall riot, did you?”
“No!. . . No. Janice, he’s just too danm good. He’d make mincemeat of me. By the time he got through I’d be The Man Who Caused the Mall Riot in every English-speaking country in the world, and some others, too, because he gets translations—”
“He’s just a commentator.”
Jerrybeny started to laugh.
“He makes it look so easy,” he said. “A hundred million eyes out there, watching him, and he knows it. Have you ever seen him self-conscious? Have you ever heard him at a loss for words? My dad used to say it about writing, but it’s true for Wash Evans. The hardest trick in the world is to make it look easy, so easy that any clod thinks he can do it just as well.