"Connie Willis - Blued Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

"I'm shut of that," Brad said when Ulric came in the door. He was sitting in the dark, the
green glow of the monitor lighting his face. He tapped at the terminal keys for a minute mor
and then turned around. "All done. Slicker'n goose grease."

Ulric turned on the light. "The waste-emissions project?" he said.

"Nope. We turned that on this afternoon. Works prettier than a spotted pony. No, I been
spending the last hour erasing my fiancee Lynn's name from the project records."

"Won't Lynn object to that?" Ulric said, fairly calmly, mostly because he did not have a
clear idea of which one Lynn was. He never could tell Brad's fiancees apart. They all soun
exactly the same.

"She won't hear tell of it till it's too late," Brad said. "She's on her way to Cheyenne to c
a plane back east. Her mother's all het up about getting a divorce. Caught her husband Adam
Evin'."

If there was anything harder to put up with than Brad's rottenness, it was his incredibly g
luck. While Ulric was sure Brad was low enough to engineer a sudden family crisis to get L
out of Chugwater, he was just as sure that he had had no need to. It was a lucky coincidence
that Lynn's mother was getting a divorce just now, and lucky coinci-dences were Brad's
specialty. How else could he have kept three fiancees from ever meeting each other in the
small confines of Chugwater and Mowen Chemical?

"Lynn?" Ulric said. "Which one is that? The redhead in programming?''

"Nope, that's Sue. Lynn's little and yellow-haired and smart as a whip about chemical
engineering. Kind of a dodunk about every thin' else."

"Dodunk," Ulric said to himself. He should make a note to look that up. It probably mean
"one so foolish as to associate with Brad McAfee." That definitely included him. He had
agreed to room with Brad because he was so surprised at being hired that it had not occurre
to him to ask for an apartment of his own.

He had graduated with an English degree that everyone had told him was worse than use
in Wyoming, and which he very soon found out was. In desperation, he had applied for a
factory job at Mowen Chemical and been hired on as com-pany linguist at an amazing salar
for reasons that had not yet become clear, though he had been at Mowen for over three mon
What had become clear was that Brad McAfee was, to use his own colorful language, a
thimblerigger, a pigeon plucker, a hornswoggler. He was steadily working his way toward
boss's daughter and the ownership of Mowen Chemical, leaving a trail of young women beh
him who all apparently believed that a man who pronounced fiancee "fee-an-see" couldn't
possibly have more than one. It was an interesting linguistic phenomenon.

At first Ulric had been taken in by Brad's homespun talk, too, even though it didn't seem
match his sophisticated abilities on the computer. Then one day he had gotten up early and
caught Brad working on a program called "Project Sally."

"I'm gonna be the president of Mowen Chemical in two shakes of a sheep's tail," Brad h