"Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

printed "FTODD" at the end, as if
authorizing a change of date on a bank
draft. But he could not help adding an
afterthought at bottom: "Oh, Jan! I miss you
right now. More than I would miss air."
I spread my hands on the table and
divorced them. Through a tick in my eyelid, I
pointlessly read the note again. All over with
our friend, his four-letter tune. I knew the
man for a year, one year ago. Before
everything fell apart, he became one of the
few who mattered to me in the world. Once,
when he was young, he stood on the code's
threshold, came as close as any human to
cracking through to those four shorthand
semaphores. Then, for years, he went under.
Slowly, astonishingly, as Franklin and I
watched, he awakened. Now, stripped of
content, he was gone.
What did it mean, "went down
admirably": resisting or acquiescing? And
what possible difference could it make to me
now? Dr. Ressler was dead. No shock, not
technically. Given his disease, he wasted and
died per timetable. But, backwater organism,
I'm no good at abstraction. A lifetime of
practice unmade in a minute. And I learn
again, in my nerve endings, that information
is never the same as knowledge.

Today in History

I met him in ignorance, a day into autumn
of 1982. Another half year passed before I
learned his name. I pinpoint the date
through the Event Calendar, one of those
well-meaning services I supervise daily for an
indifferent audience. Research, edit, type,
and list for the consumption of the dabbling
public what, if anything, happened today in
the past, ignoring the contradiction in terms.
For five years I've posted the day's event,
finding exactly the right bite-sized fact to
feed the public library patron. Five years
times fifty weeks times five days is 1,250 daily
facts. The public librarian's knocking out of
the weekly cantata. Something to do. Until
today.
The race is constantly sneaking up to
something: space shots, cathedrals, mill