"Mike Resnick & David Gerrold - Jellyfish" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

A possible hi-ho!

But first, he had another page and a half to com-plete. He scratched
his cheek, considering. The kettle began to whistle. Filk dropped a soggy
peppermint teabag into a stained mug with a chip on its handle. He had
used this teabag for two—no, three—days already. That meant it still had a
few more days of usefulness. He poured boiling water into the mug. He
imagined—or maybe he halluci-nated—that he could hear the teabag
screaming. Its screaming was a lot less noticeable now. The first day, it had
not stopped shrieking for several minutes.

Filk put the mug of peppermint-flavored hot water on the counter. A
sentence had popped into that place that most people would have
identified as consciousness, but which Filk perceived only as a travel hub
for delusional incidents in transit from one realm to another.

He sat down on the bed, his tea forgotten. He began to methodically
type. This time, his two index fingers moved from key to key like beakless
chickens pecking at a science-fair exhibit. If they pecked long enough and
hard enough, Thorbald Helmholtz would send them a check.

Of course. So it goes. See?

****

ON THE THIRD day, Filk rose from that non-fatal state of death that passed
for sleep in his metabo-lism. Without noticing the transition from bed to
bathroom, he stood in the tepid shower and began to wash himself with a
fading sliver of soap, which probably wasn’t quite as old as he was. He
thought about shampoo, remembered again that he didn’t have any, and
washed his hair with the last of the soap instead. Maybe that would stop the
itching for a while.

The teabag moaned when he poured the hot water onto it. It was too
weak to scream.

At last, having tended to all of the needs of his body that he could
identify and localize, Filk returned to the bed, the TV table, and the battered
portable typewriter. He rolled in a fresh piece of paper. He hesitated. He
picked up the top page from the stack to his left. It was face down. He
turned it over. He looked at the page number. Page 8. He replaced it on the
stack, face down.

He typed Page 9.

And stopped.

Now that he had invented the Tryllifandillorians—and made them real
enough to scream even louder than a peppermint teabag—it was time to