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

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--September--

On back-to-school day, Sarah Jane Johnson and Casimir Radon
waited, for a while, in line together. At the time they did not know
each other. Sarah had just found that she had no place to live, and
was suffering that tense and lonely feeling that sets in when you
have no place to hide. Casimir was just discovering that American
Megaversity was a terrible place, and was not happy either.
After they had worked their way down the hail and into the
office of the Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities, they
sat down next to each other on the scratchy Daygb orange chairs
below the Julian Didius III Memorial Window. The sunlight strained
in greyly over their shoulders, and occasionally they turned to look
at the scene outside.
Below them on one of the Parkway off-ramps a rented truck
from Maryland had tried to pass under a low bridge, its student
driver forgetting that he was in a truck and not his Trans-Am. Upon
impact, the steel molding that fastened the truck's top to its sides had
wrapped itself around the frame of a green highway sign bolted to
the bridge. Now the sign, which read:

AMERICAN MEGAVERSITY

VISITOR PARKING

SPORTS EVENTS

EXIT 500 FT.

was suspended in the air at the end of a long strip of truck that
had been peeled up and aside.
A small crowd students, apparently finished with all their line-
waiting, stood on the bridge and beside the ramp, throwing Frisbees
and debris into the torn-open back of the truck, where its renters
lounged in sofas and recliners and drank beer, and threw the
projectiles back. Sarah thought it was idiotic, and Casimir couldn't
understand it at all.
Out in the hallway, people behind them in the line were being
verbally abused by an old derelict who had penetrated the Plex
security system. "The only degree you kids deserve is the third
degree!" he shouted, waving his arms and staggering in place. He
wore a ratty tweed jacket whose elbow patches flapped like vestigial
wings, and he drank in turns from a bottle of Happy's vodka and a
Schlitz tall-boy which he kept holstered in his pockets. He had the
full attention of the students, who were understandably bored, and
most of them laughed and tried to think of provocative remarks.
As the drunk was wading toward them, one asked another how
her summer had been. "What about it?" asked the derelict. "Fiscal