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

For God's sake, a man's dying here."
Some of these kids were such cretins, how did they make it into
college? Money, probably. "Listen, use your head, kid," he said, not
unkindly. "We're the Emergency Services desk. We can't leave our
posts. What would happen if there was an emergency while we were
gone?"
This was answered by silence; but in the background, Benson
could just make out another voice, which sounded familiar: "You
should have listened to what he was trying to tell you! He wasn't
farting around! We had to sack the Cartography Department to
afford him. And you don't listen!"
"Shut up!" shouted the gas freak.
"Hey, is that Bert? Is that Bert Nix on the phone?" asked Bill
Benson. "Where are you, kid?"
"Emeritus Row!' shouted the kid, and dropped the phone. Bill
Benson continued to listen after the BONKITY-BONK of the phone's
impact, trying to make sure it was really good old Bert Nix. I think
he heard this poem; on the news, he claimed he heard a poem, and it
could well have been this, which Bert Nix quoted regularly and liked
to write on the walls:

Tenuring and tenuring in the ivory tower!
The flagon cannot fill the flagoneers.
Krupp cuts a fart! The sphinxter cannot hold
Dear academe, our Lusitanta, recoils.
The time-limned dons are noosed. With airy webs
The cerebrally infarcted bring me down.
The East affects conscription, while the curst
Are gulled with Fashionate Propensities.

Shrilly, sum reevaluation is demanded.
Earlier-reckoned commencement is programmed!
What fecund mumming! Outly ward those words hard
When a glassed grimace on an animal Monday
Rumbles at night; unaware that the plans aren't deserved
Escapists' lie-panoply aims to head off the Fan.
A sign frank and witless as the Sun
Is mute in the skies, yet from it are shouted
Real shadows of endogenous deserted words.
The concrete drops down in; but know I now
That thirty-storied stone steel keeps
When next the might of Air are rooks unstable.
What buff be; its towers coming down deglassed
Slumps amid Bedlam in the morn?

"Holy shit!" cried Bill Benson. "Bert? Is that you? Hell, maybe
something's up. Sam, punch me onto line six there and Ill see if I can
raise the folks down at nine-one-one."
Casimir was careening through the halls, cursing himself for
having had to leave Sharon alone with a derelict, adrenaline blasting