"Big U, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stephenson Neal)

already clotting, but the side wound was ghastly and Casimir did not
even know whether to remove the splinter. Blood built up at the
corners of Sharon's mouth as he gasped and wheezed. Brushing tears
and dirt from his own face, Casimir looked for the phone.
He started away as a small bat fluttered past.
"Troglodyte! No manners! This is what you're supposed to
see!" Casimir whirled to see Bert Nix plunging from the open door
toward Sharon's desk. Casimir tried to head him off, fearing some
kind of attack, but Bert Nix stopped short and pointed triumphantly
to Sharon. Casimir turned to look. Sharon was gazing at him dully
through half-shut eyes, and weakly pounding his finger into a spot
on the tabletop. Casimir leaned over and looked. Sharon was
pointing at the Table of the Elements, indicating the box for Oxygen.
"Oxygen! Oh two! Get it?" shouted Bert Nix.
Bill Benson, Security Guard 5, was arguing with a friend
whether it was possible that F.D.R. committed suicide when the
emergency line rang. He let it ring four times. Since ninety-nine calls
out of a hundred were pranks, by letting each one ring four times he
was delaying the true emergency calls by an average of only four
one-hundredths of a ring apiece—nothing compared with the time it
took to respond. Anyway, fed up with kids getting stoned at parties
and fallii on the way out to barf and spraining their wrists, then
(through some miracle of temporary clearheadedness) calling
Emergency and trying to articulate their problems through a
hallucinogenic miasma while monster stereos in the background
threatened to uncurl his phone cord. Eventually, though, he did pick
up the phone, holding the earpiece several inches from his head in
case it was another of those goddamn Stalinist whistle-blasters.
"Listen," came the voice, sounding distant, "I've got to have
some oxygen. Do you have some there? It's an emergency!"
Oh, shit, Did he have to get this call every night? He listened for
a few more seconds. "It's an oxygen freak," he said to his friend,
covering the mouthpiece with his hand.
"Oxygen freak? What do they do with oxygen?"
Benson swung his feet down from the counter, put the receiver
in his lap, and explained. "See, nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, is the
big thing. They breathe it through masks, like for surgery. But if you
breathe it pure you'll kick in no time, because you got to have
oxygen. And they are so crazy about laughing gas they don't want to
take off that mask even to breathe, so they like to get some oxygen
to mix with it so that they can sit there all goddamn night long and
breathe nothing else and get blasted out of their little minds. So we
always get these calls."
He picked up the receiver again, took a puff on his cigar,
exhaled slowly. "Hello?" he said, hoping the poor gas-crazed sap
had hung up.
"Yeah? When will it be here?"
"Cripes!" Bill Benson shouted, "look, guy, hang it up. We don't
have any and you aren't allowed to have it."
"Well, shit then, come up here and help me. Call an ambulance!