"Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens of Titan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

Constant shook his head. "No. That would be hard to deny," he said.
"And to what do you attribute this wonderful luck of yours?" said Rumfoord.
Constant shrugged. "Who knows?" he said. "I guess somebody up there likes me," he said.
Rumfoord looked up at the ceiling. "What a charming concept — someone's liking you up
there."
Constant, who had been shaking hands with Rumfoord during the conversation, thought of his
own hand, suddenly, as small and clawlike.
 Rumfoord's palm was callused, but not horny like the palm of a man doomed to a single trade
for all of his days. The calluses were perfectly even, made by the thousand happy labors of an
active leisure class.
For a moment, Constant forgot that the man whose hand he shook was simply one aspect, one
node of a wave phenomenon extending all the way from the Sun to Betelguese. The handshake
reminded Constant what it was that he was touching — for his hand tingled with a small but
unmistakable electrical flow.

Constant had not been bullied into feeling inferior by the tone of Mrs. Rumfoord's invitation to
the materialization. Constant was a male and Mrs. Rumfoord was a female, and Constant
imagined that he had the means of demonstrating, if given the opportunity, his unquestionable
superiority.
Winston Niles Rumfoord was something else again — morally, spatially, socially, sexually,
and electrically. Winston Niles Rumfoord's smile and handshake dis. mantled Constant's high
opinion of himself as efficiently as carnival roustabouts might dismantle a Ferris wheel.
Constant, who had offered his services to God as a messenger, now panicked before the very
moderate greatness of Rumfoord. Constant ransacked his memory for past proofs of his own
greatness. He ransacked his memory like a thief going through another man's billfold. Constant
found his memory stuffed with rumpled, overexposed snapshots of all the women he had had,
with preposterous credentials testifying to his ownership of even more preposterous enterprises,
with testimonials that attributed to him virtues and strengths that only three billion dollars could
have. There was even a silver medal with a red ribbon — awarded to Constant for placing second
in the hop, skip, and jump in an intramural track meet at the University of Virginia.
Rumfoord's smile went on and on.
To follow the analogy of the thief who is going through another man's billfold: Constant
ripped open the seams of his memory, hoping to find a secret compartment with something of
value in it. There was no secret compartment — nothing of value. All that remained to Constant
were the husks of his memory — unstitched, flaccid flaps.
The ancient butler looked adoringly at Rumfoord, went through the cringing contortions of an
ugly old woman posing for a painting of the Madonna. "The mah-stuh — " he bleated. "The
young mah-stuh."
"I can read your mind, you know," said Rumfoord.
"Can you?" said Constant humbly.
"Easiest thing in the world," said Rumford. His eyes twinkled. "You're not a bad sort, you
know — " he said, "particularly when you forget who you are." He touched Constant lightly on
the arm. It was a politician's gesture — a vulgar public gesture by a man who in private, among
his own kind, would take wincing pains never to touch anyone.
"If it's really so important to you, at this stage of our relationship, to feel superior to me in
some way," he said to Constant pleasantly, "think of this: You can reproduce and I cannot."
He now turned his broad back to Constant, led the way through a series of very grand
chambers.
He paused in one, insisted that Constant admire a huge oil painting of a little girl holding the
reins of a pure white pony. The little girl wore a white bonnet, a white, starched dress, white