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

They both got out of class at 3:30. Each would spend twenty
minutes dashing through the labyrinthine ways of the Monoplex,
pounding fruitlessly on elevator buttons and bounding up steps three
at a time, palpitating at the thought of having to listen to his
roommate's music until at least midnight. Often as not, one would
explode from the elevator on EO7S, veer around to the corridor, and
with disgust feel the other's tunes pulsing victoriously through the
floor. Sometimes, though, they would arrive simultaneously and
power up their Systems together. The first time they tried this, about
halfway through September, the room's circuit breaker shut down.
They sat in darkness and silence for above half an hour, each
knowing that if he left his stereo to turn the power back on, the other
would have his going full blast by the time he returned. This impasse
was concluded by a simultaneous two-tower fire drill that kept both
out of the room for three hours.
Subsequently John Wesley Fenrick ran a fifty-foot tn-lead
extension cord down the hallway and into the Social Lounge, and
plugged his System into that. This meant that he could now shut
down Klein's stereo simply by turning on his burger-maker, donut-
maker, blow-dryer and bun-warmer simultaneously, shutting off the
room's circuit breaker. But Klein was only three feet from the
extension cord and thus could easily shut Fenrick down with a tug.
So these tactics were not resorted to; the duelists preferred, against
all reason, to wait each other out.
Klein used organ music, usually lush garbled Romantic
masterpieces or what he called Atomic Bach. Fenrick had the edge in
system power, but most of that year's music was not as dense as,
say, Heavy Metal had been in its prime, and so this difference was
usually erased by the thinness of his ammunition. This did not mean,


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however, that we had any trouble hearing him.
The Systems would trade salvos as the volume controls were
brought up as high as they could go, the screaming-guitars-from-Hell
power chords on one side matched by the subterranean grease-gun
blasts of the 32-foot reed stops on the other. As both recordings piled
into the thick of things, the combatants would turn to their long thin
frequency equalizers and shove all channels up to full blast like Mr.
Spock beaming a live antimatter bomb into Deep Space. Finally the
filters would be thrown off and the loudness switches on, and the
speakers would distort and crackle with strain as huge wattages
pulsed through their magnet coils. Sometimes Klein would use
Bach's "Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor," and at the end of each
phrase the bass line would plunge back down home to that old low
C, and Klein's sub-woofers would pick up the temblor of the 64-foot
pipes and magnify it until he could watch the naked speaker cones
thrash away at in the air. This particular note happened to be the