"Pohl, Frederik - Enjoy, Enjoy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Enjoy, EnjoyENJOY, ENJOY

by Frederik Pohl
Version 1.0


Terry Carr is one of the true gentlemen of the science- fiction field. Editors
have trouble being beloved; what they do cuts too close to the writers' bones
for comfort. I do not believe there is an editor in the world who some writer,
somewhere, does not wish dead. On those grounds I feel sure that there must
therefore be some people who hate Terry Carr, but I've never met one. Perhaps
the reason is that he has never been in charge of a major magazine or boss of a
large book publishing company; he has put in his editorial time as editorial
consultant, anthologist, assistant to other editors, proprietor of a special
line of his own within a larger group, and these are not the exposed
mountaintops where the ravaging lightnings strike. However, they are good places
for someone to be whose biggest interest is in finding and showcasing bright new
talent. That's something Terry does extremely well. Devotees still fondly
remember the Carr "Ace Special series of a decade and a half ago, when Terry
took his chances on such unknowns as Ursula K. LeGuin, Joanna Russ, R. A.
Lafferty, and a lot of others whose subsequent careers show how good an editor
he really is. So when Terry Carr asks me for something, I try to deliver; and
when he told me he was putting together a new anthology of original stories
called Fellowship of the Stars, I was pleased to offer him this one-and
delighted when he accepted it.
Booze, broads, big cars, the finest of food, waterbeds filled with vintage
champagne. Those were some of the things that went with Tud Cowpersmith's job.
The way he got the job was by going to a party in Jackson Heights. The way he
happened to be at the party was that he had no choice.
It wasn't a bad party, for a loft in Jackson Heights. It wasn't a bad loft. The
windows at one end looked out on the tracks of the IRT el, but they had been
painted over with acrylics to look like stained glass. Every twenty minutes you
got a noise like some very large person stumbling by with garbage-can lids for
shoes, but except for that the el might as well not have been there. Anyway, at
that end of the loft the stereo speakers stood four feet high on the floor, so
the noise didn't matter all that much. You couldn't possibly talk at that end.
Cowpersmith wanted, eventually, to talk, as soon as the person he wanted to talk
to showed up, so he drifted to the other end.
There the noise was more or less bearable, and there the windows were still
clear. They were even clean. He could see through them down on a sort of
communal garden, three or four backyards for three or four different old
apartment buildings thrown together: a tiny round plastic swimming pool, now
iced over with leaves and boughs frozen into it; bare trees that probably had
looked very nice in the summer. To get to the windows at that end you had to
thread your way through a sort of indoor jungle, potted plants presumably
carried in from the garden for the cold weather. And there, on a chrome-rimmed,
chrome-legged kitchen table, the host and hostess were rolling joints. They
greeted Cowpersmith- "Want a hit?
"Thanks.
-but the pot did not ease him. He was looking for somebody. That was the reason