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

Just try to be nice."


"Who are you bringing to the party?" Avery asked the Countess when she swept into the
room like an errant breeze.
"I'm bringing an Able-bodied Seaman, a charming man I met at the Waldorf last month. A
most charming man."


"Of course," said the Countess at the party, preening her downy bosom with a hand
dazzlingly jeweled; she was looking across the noisy room at her sailor, who leaned against the
bar with a drink in his hand and a surly expression on his perfect face. The party was in full
swing, and dinner was about to be served. She was talking to the former Governor's wife, who
was shaped like a bowl of pretzels.
"Of course," the Countess repeated, "I love him for his rank."
"Hmm," said the former Governor's wife. Her mouth steadily chewed an hors d'oeuvre, so
the "Hmm" was muted.
"I realize," said the Countess in a conspiratorial whisper, "that he's not really our sort of
people. Not our sort at all, no. But he fucks like a maniac."
The former Governor's wife swallowed her hors d'oeuvre. "That's nice," she said.
The party was a great success, rotating as it did around the Secretary of State, with the two
frigid poles of the Governor and the former Governor to maintain separation. The Countess
was invited to the children's room to witness the mating of Freddie and Arthur, but things were
quiet.
Mr. Sparrow lost his wife to Avery's brother Nelson and went home with his mother and his
niece. It was rumored in his neighborhood that strange things went on at his house, very
peculiar things. But it was a well-bred neighborhood with quiet estates and the rumor stayed
local.
Avery hugged his two exquisite children to himself and whispered that he would go away,
but not to worry please, that he would be back, and that even gone he would look over them,
and they said Sure, not certain then how long ten years really was, and he turned gruffly from
the room.
He left the next day for intergalactic space, where he would tumble through the silence far
from stars and girls, listening to Mozart on his tape deck and thinking of himself as one small
raisin adrift in the intergalactic pudding.
When he returned the former Governor had lost his wife and was married to the Countess.
There was no trace of the Able-bodied Seaman.
3/ Frozen Daiquiris

AVERY'S MIDDLE NAME WAS Krupp, which connected him, distantly but distinctly, to
the German Krupps, who spent the nineteenth century and half of the twentieth manufacturing
steel and ordance for anyone who wanted those things. Almost everyone wanted them, so the
Krupps got rich.
Avery suppressed his middle name, but he was in rockets after the war. He was also visibly
in petrochemicals, cosmetics and detergents. But mainly he was in rockets. Tiny rockets the
size of knitting needles, carrying small explosive heads that could blow the kneecap off an
enemy soldier or disable a tank. Medium-sized rockets to carry satellites the size of golf balls
into orbit, where they would roll around the cosmic fairway looking for other satellites.
Eventually he abandoned military rockets but maintained his interest in rocketry. The result
was the large rocket that would hurtle him into his self-imposed exile in intergalactic space,