"Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

But in no way did any of the Marines comprehend what a big deal Station Alpha was until today. Their
job had turned out to involve wrapping a ton of equipment and several tons of paper in tarps and moving
it out of doors. Then they spent Thursday tearing the shack apart, making it into a bonfire, and burning
certain books and papers.

"Sheeeyit!" Private Wiley hollers. Only a few of the coolies have gotten out of the way, or even seen
them. But then there is this fantastic boom from the river, like the sound of a mile-thick bamboo pole
being snapped over God's knee. Half a second later there're no coolies in the street anymore--just a lot of
boxes with unmanned bamboo poles teeter-tottering on them, bonging into the streets like wind-chimes.
Above, a furry mushroom of grey smoke rises from the gunboat. Wiley shifts up to high gear and floors
it. Shaftoe cringes against the truck's door and lowers his head, hoping that his campy Great War
doughboy helmet will be good for something. Then money-boxes start to rupture and explode as the
truck rams through them. Shaftoe peers up through a blizzard of notes and sees giant bamboo poles
soaring and bounding and windmilling toward the waterfront.

The leaves of Shanghai:
Pale doorways in a steel sky.
Winter has begun.

Chapter 1
BARRENS
Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-
replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each
other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means
which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the
universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate. After about three billion years
of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage, Godfrey Waterhouse IV was
born, in Murdo, South Dakota, to Blanche, the wife of a Congregational preacher named Bunyan
Waterhouse. Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous
badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line
of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo--which, given the
number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of
all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.


file:///G|/eMule/Incoming/(ebook)%20Neal%20Stephenso.../(ebook)%20Neal%20Stephenson%20-%20Cryptonomicon.htm (4 of 867)4-7-2004 14:59:53
 Neal Stephenson - Cryptonomicon


As nightmarishly lethal, memetically programmed death-machines went, these were the nicest you could
ever hope to meet. In the tradition of his namesake (the Puritan writer John Bunyan, who spent much of
his life in jail, or trying to avoid it) the Rev. Waterhouse did not preach in any one place for long. The
church moved him from one small town in the Dakotas to another every year or two. It is possible that
Godfrey found the lifestyle more than a little alienating, for, sometime during the course of his studies at
Fargo Congregational College, he bolted from the fold and, to the enduring agony of his parents, fell
into worldly pursuits, and ended up, somehow, getting a Ph.D. in Classics from a small private
university in Ohio. Academics being no less nomadic than Congregational preachers, he took work
where he could find it. He became a Professor of Greek and Latin at Bolger Christian College
(enrollment 322) in West Point, Virginia, where the Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers came together to