"Spider Robinson - The Mind 2 - Time Pressure" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

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Time Pressure




Spider Robinson




For all my North Mountain friends,
hippies, locals and visitors,
and for Raoul Vezina and Steve Thomas




from Deathkiller, ©1996




PROLOGUE


I guarantee that every word of this story is a lie.




ONE


It was a dark and stormy night . . .
Your suspension of disbelief has probably just bust a leaf-spring: how can you
believe in a story that begins that way? I know it's one of the hoariest cliche[aas in pulp
fiction; my writer friend Snaker uses the expression satirically often enough. "It was a
dark and stormy night—when suddenly the shot rang out. . . ." But I don't especially want
you to believe this story—I just want you to listen to it—and even if I were concerned
with convincing you there wouldn't be anything I could do about it, the story begins
where it begins and that's all there is to it.
And "dark" is not redundant. Most nights along the shore of the Bay of Fundy are
not particularly dark, as nights go. There's a lot of sky on the Fundy Shore, as transparent
as a politician's promise, and that makes for a lot of starlight even on Moonless evenings.
When the Moon's up it turns the forest into a fairyland—and even when the big clouds