"Rudy Rucker - The Man Who Ate Himself" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rucker Rudy)

Harry ambled around the corner of the house. He looked like he wanted to laugh. Holding a tight, straight
mouth, he took a seat next to me. There was a silence.

"I looked at it," Harry said finally. "I guess I owe Mr. Marston some sort of apology." Then, with terrible
inap-propriateness, he giggled.

"Looked at what?" I asked sharply.

"It's a little bit late for an apology, Dr. Gerber?" Evangeline spoke across me. Her voice was cold, but
there was a hint of satisfaction in it.
"Do you think I could photograph it before...." Harry began.

"I'm not at all sure we're going to send it off," Evangeline replied. "Mr. Fletcher has just told me he can
only guarantee a thousand years."

Harry made a negative, frog-like face. "Fletch doesn't know what he's talking about. Once it goes into
orbit around the galaxy, the energy requirement goes down to oh-point-zilch. I can promise you ten
billion years. A whole cosmic cycle."

'What the lame-brained hell is a cosmic cycle supposed to be?" I burst out. Harry had hurt my feelings.

Evangeline seemed to know. "That's how long the universe lasts," she explained. "That nice little
professor at Austin told me about it. Time is only supposed to be ten billion years long?"

"That's right," Harry said, with another giggle. "And wouldn't it be something if your husband's capsule
lasts all the way? The first man to travel around time!"

I thought for a minute. "When you say around, do you mean...?"

Harry interrupted me. "I don't see why we shouldn't be able to get him launched tonight."

I took a long drink of my bourbon. Sitting in the middle of the crater containing Marston's house, I felt
like I was at the center of a bull's-eye. The house, the lawn, the inner fence, the fake African savannah,
the outer fence ... it was all Marston's, and I wanted to get out. I held my glass up to the setting sun. "So
let's get to work."

We got the guidance system out of the car's trunk. We had six little ion jets coupled to crystal sensors,
and a power pack to drive the jets. Microprocessors were built in. The pack was no bigger than a
knapsack, but we had wedged enough unconfined quarks in there to run New York City for ten years.
Two of Marston's nuclear-power plants had piped us the energy. If he was lucky enough not to have too
many near misses, maybe he would make it into galactic orbit.

Evangeline brought the android over to help. The TV-screen face was playing a tape of Marston, in
blackface, singing spirituals. Weird. Evangeline stepped forward and flicked a switch on the machine's
back. It's face shrank to a point of light and winked out. The locusts shrilled on.

Nothing Harry or Evangeline had said had prepared me for Marston's capsule. It was like a giant razor
clam. The two shell-halves were made of some shiny, lava-like substance. In back they were joined by
metal hinges. In front they were propped open with a two-by-four. Inside was a cylindrical hollow, just