"Vonnegut, Kurt - Galapagos" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vonnegut Kurt)

So it was November now, and the Hiroguchis were in Guayaquil. On the advice of *MacIntosh, *Zenji had lied to his employers about where he was going. He had led them to believe that he was exhausted by the creation of Mandarax, and that he and Hisako wished to have two months all by themselves, far from any reminders of work, and incommunicado. He put his piece of misinformation into their big brains: he had chartered schooner with crew, whose name he did not wish to reveal, sailing from a Mexican port whose name he did not wish to reveal, for a cruise through the islands of the Caribbean.
And, although the passenger list for "the Nature Cruise of the Century" had been widely publicized, *Zenji's employers never learned that their most productive employee and his wife were also expected to be aboard. Like James Wait, they were traveling under false identities.
And, again like James Wait, they had evanesced!
Anybody looking for them would not be able to find them anywhere. Any big-brained search for them wouldn't even start on the correct continent.









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There in their hotel room next to Mary Hepburn's, the Hiroguchis were susurruing away about *Andrew MacIntosh's being an actual maniac. This was an exaggeration. *MacIntosh was surely wild and greedy and inconsiderate, but not insane. Most of what his big brain believed to be going on was actually going on. When he flew Selena and Kazakh and the Hiroguchis from Mйrida to Guayaquil in his private Learjet, with himself at the controls, he had known that the city would be under martial law, or something close to it, and that the stores would all be closed, and that there would be increasingly hungry people milling around, and that the _Bahнa de Darwin_ would not sail as scheduled, probably, and so on.
The communications facilities in his Yucatecan mansion had kept him absolutely up to date on what was going on in Ecuador or anyplace else he might have reason to care about. At the same time he had kept the Hiroguchis, but not his blind daughter, in the dark, so to speak, about what was likely awaiting them.
His true purpose in coming to Guayaquil, which, again, he had revealed to his daughter but not to the Hiroguchis, was to buy as many Ecuadorian assets as possible at rock-bottom prices, including, perhaps, even the El Dorado and the _Bahнa de Darwin_ -- and gold mines and oil fields, and on and on. He was moreover going to bond *Zenji Hiroguchi to himself forever by sharing these business opportunities with him, to lend him money so that he, too, could become a major property owner in Ecuador.

o

*MacIntosh had told the Hiroguchis to stay in their room at the El Dorado -- because he would soon be bringing wonderful news for them. He had been on the telephone all afternoon, calling Ecuadorian financiers and banks, and the news he expected to bring was about all the properties he and the Hiroguchis could call their own in a day or two.
And then he was going to say: "And to hell with 'the Nature Cruise of the Century'!"

o

The Hiroguchis could no longer conceive of any good news for themselves which could be delivered by *Andrew MacIntosh. They honestly believed him to be a madman, which misconception, ironically, had been impressed upon them by *Zenji's own creation, which was Mandarax. There were now ten such instruments in the world, nine back in Tokyo, and one which *Zenji had brought along for the cruise. Mandarax, unlike Gokubi, was not only a translator, but also could diagnose with respectable accuracy one thousand of the most common diseases which attacked _Homo sapiens_, including twelve varieties of nervous breakdown.
What Mandarax did in the medical field was simplicity itself, actually. Mandarax was programed to do what real doctors did, which was to ask a series of questions, each answer suggesting the next question, such as: "How is your appetite?" and then, "Do your bowels move regularly? and, perhaps, "What did the stool look like?" and so on.
In Yucatбn, the Hiroguchis had followed such a daisy chain of questions and answers, describing for Mandarax the behavior of *Andrew MacIntosh. Mandarax had at last displayed these words in Japanese on the screen, which was about the size of a playing card: _Pathological personality_.

o

Unfortunately for the Hiroguchis, but not for Mandarax, which couldn't feel anything or care about anything, the computer was not programed to explain that this was a rather mild affliction compared to most, and that those who had it were rarely hospitalized, that they were, in fact, among the happiest people on the planet -- and that their behavior merely caused pain to those around them, and almost never to themselves. A real doctor might have gone on to say that millions of people walking the streets every day fell into a gray area, where it was difficult to say with any degree of certainty whether or not their personalities were pathological.
But the Hiroguchis were ignorant of medical matters, and so responded to the diagnosis as though it were a dread disease. So, one way or another, they wanted to get away from *Andrew MacIntosh, and then all the way back to Tokyo. But they remained dependent on him, as much as they wished they weren't. They had learned from the mournful-looking hotel manager, speaking to him through Mandarax, that all commercial flights out of Guayaquil had been canceled, and that none of the companies with planes for charter seemed to be answering their phones.
So that left the petrified Hiroguchis with only two possible ways of egress from Guayaquil: either on *MacIntosh's Learjet, or aboard the _Bahнa de Darwin_, if, as was becoming harder and harder to believe, it would really sail next day.









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