"Spider Robinson - The Magnificent Conspiracy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

smashed it flat.
Gil, I'm sorry!

IV

Ever since Nam I've been accustomed to coming awake instantly—sometimes
with a wea-pon in my hand. I had forgotten what a luxuri-ous pleasure it can be to let
awareness and alertness seep back in at their own pace, to be truly relaxed. I lay still
for some time, aware of my surroundings only in terms of their peacefulness, before
it occurred to me to identify them. Nor did I feel, then, the slightest surprise or alarm
at the defection of my subconscious sentries. It was as though in some back corner
of my mind a dozen yammering voices had, for the first time within memory, shut
up. All deci-sions were made ...
I was in the same chair I'd left so hastily. It was tilted and reshaped into something
more closely resembling the acceleration cradles astro-nauts take off in, only more
comfortable. My left wrist was set and efficiently splinted, and hurt surprisingly little.
Above me girders played geo-metric games across the high curved ceiling,
interspersed with diffused-light fixtures that did not hurt to look at. Somewhere to
my left, work was being done. It produced sound, but sound is divided into music
and noise and somehow this clattering wasn't noise. I waited until it stopped, with
infinite patience, in no hurry at all.
When there had been no sound for a while I got up and turned and saw Cardwell
again emerging from the pit beneath the Rambler, with a thick streak of grease across
his forehead and a skinned knuckle. He beamed. "I love ball joints. Your wrist
okay?"
"Yes, thanks."
He came over, turned my chair back into a chair, and sank into his own. He
produced ciga-rettes and gave me one. I noticed a wooden stool, obviously
handmade, lying crippled near a workbench. I realized that Cardwell had sawed off
and split two of its legs to make the splints on my wrist. The stool was quite old,
and all at once I felt more guilt and shame for its destruction than I did for having
come to murder its owner. This amused me sourly. I took my cigarette to the front
of the garage, where one of the great bay doors now stood open, and watched night
sky and listened to crickets and bull frogs while I smoked. Shop closed, Arden gone
home. Af-ter a while Cardwell got up and came to the door, too, and we stepped out
into the darkness. The traffic, too, had mostly gone home for the night, and there
was no moon. The dark suited me fine.
"My name," I said softly, "is Bill Maeder." From out of the black Cardwell's voice
was serene. "Pleased to meet you," was all he said. We walked on.
"I used to be a twin," I said, flicking the cigarette butt beneath my walking feet.
"My brother's name was Gil, and we were identical twins. After enough people have
called your twin your Other Half, you begin to believe it. I guess we allowed
ourselves to become polarized, because that suited everyone's sense of symmetry or
some damned thing. Yin and Yang Maeder, they called us. All our lives we disagreed
on everything, and we loved each other deeply.
"Then they called us in for our draft physi-cal. I showed up and he didn't and so
they sent me to Nam and Gil to Leavenworth. I walked through the jungles and came
out a hero. Gil died in his cell at the end of a protracted hun-ger strike. A man who is
starving to death smells like fresh-baked bread, did you know that? I spent my whole
first furlough practically living in his cell, arguing with him and screaming at him, and