"Rob Swigart - AKA" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swigart Rob)

had lost control of it. It had taken him a long time to get past all the secretaries for an
appointment with the Augenblaue AeroSpace research director. He had spent almost an hour
with Merkin and hadn't learned anything yet. Jesus, he though, this guy Merkin is off the wall.
Or else that's some kind of dummy sitting in his chair, jabbering away.
"After he had paused at the bottom of the ladder for a few seconds, or was it longer? It
might have been several minutes, now that I reconsider it. Yes, even as much as two minutes.
He walked over and shook my hand. 'Good to see you again, Ambrose,' he greeted me. The
small group of technicians and media people around us gave a loud cheer for him. They all
belong to AKA, so they, I should say, we, felt privileged to be with him."
"What happened next?" Hubble asked. He was slumped in his chair, watching Ambrose
through slitted eyelids.
"Then his wife drove him home, of course. It was a long drive back to Evanston, and his
wife was throwing a welcome home party for him."
Ambrose displayed his large teeth and wide, innocent eyes.
"Ahhhhh," whispered Constantine Hubble.
2/ Intergalactic Pudding

"WHAT'S IT LIKE out there?" Avery already knew pretty much what it was like out there.
It was like nothing.
"Well, if you mean out there" - Ambrose Merkin gave a little twitch of his hand, toward the
heavens - "it's like nothing." Dr. Merkin was Avery's director of research. "Or at least almost
nothing."
"Sounds nice," said Avery. All around them the sounds of rivets, liquid oxygen hissing
through pipes, intense pressures, purposeful work, painted the background - the white noise of
industry. Muted voices wavered through the misted air.
"If you like that sort of thing," said Dr. Merkin. He gave another twitch to his left hand, a
flipper twitch. He was leaning over the railing of the catwalk 227 feet above the assembly floor
of the Augenblaue AeroSpace facility at Kankakee, Illinois. "I wouldn't like it myself. No
girls."
"Ah," said Avery. He smiled. "No girls. I leave Sunday." This was Friday.


"How long did you say you'd be gone?" Kay, his wife, asked him when he got home.
"About ten years, all together. I think. Well, I know. Actually." They were standing in the
vestibule of their house in suburban Chicago. She was arranging flowers for Avery's bon
voyage party the following night.
"The bluebells look nice, don't you think, dear?"
Kay had peculiar orange hair that stood up straight until, fatigued, it fell over backward.
Avery's cosmetics division had tried without success to duplicate that hair. No one understood
why. Avery was the only person in the world who found her hair attractive. At the moment it
dashed nastily with the delicately washed blues of the original Japanese woodblock print behind
her head, "Autumn Moon at Ishiyama," by Hiroshige. The flowers, too, seemed a vulgar
display beside the subtle sky and lake in the print.
"The bluebells look nice." Avery sighed. He was about to grab his wife's ass, which bunched
and unbunched sinuously under her silk frock like a giant sea anemone, when the butler,
August, emerged from the solarium and walked across the parquet and through the double
doors into the dining room. He was carrying a silver tray stacked high with place cards.
Avery's hand continued upward to scratch feebly at his furrowed forehead. "Ah," he said.
"Ah, who's coming? To the party." His momentary lust quite died.
"Well. The General and his wife. The Governor and the former Governor..."