"Robert F. Young - Hologirl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

newcomer would bother to wash his socks?) and, relatively speaking, young for a winehead. Young
enough and not yet far gone enough to swallow when he saw me. When he made a grab for me as I
passed I whacked his hand with my handbag. When he lunged for me I gave him another whack, this
time on the side of the head. I left him sitting in the middle of the creek, sobbing.
I don’t much care for wineheads.

Wentworth didn't have a mailbox out front with his name on it, but I was sure when I came to the
one-room prefab with the window boxes that it was his. There was nothing in the window boxes except
wine bottles, but they still provided a distinction of sorts, and Went worth, I was certain, was not a
typical winehead.
I ascended a trio of warped steps to a wobbly stoop and looked through a screenless screendoor.
"Thomas Wentworth?"
The figure slumped in the room's only chair stirred. "Thomas Wentworth is dead. Requiescat in pace
."
I stepped inside, opened my handbag and tossed one of the two pints of Muscatel (miraculously,
neither was broken) into his lap. I set the other on a nearby window sill. Wentworth opened the one I'd
tossed him and chug-a-lugged a third of its contents. After he wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve, I said,
"In five minutes, I'm leaving. Whether or not I take the other pint with me depends on how promptly and
straightforwardly you provide answers to a few questions I'm going to ask. Ready? Here comes the first:
Did you and Kurilman part friends?"
I couldn't see his face very well in the dim, foliage-filtered light coming in the windows and the door.
Wineheads don't have faces anyway — only molding clay that keeps sagging no matter how many times
they press it back into shape. At length Wentworth said, "Kurilman paid me what I asked. He knew what
I'd do with the money. And he knew that after a year or so I'd be too far gone to build another machine
and that in the interim I wouldn't try. No, I guess you could hardly say we parted friends. But we didn't
part enemies either."
"You blackmail him, of course."
"Regularly. But only for a little at a time."
"This machine you alluded to — what did you call it?"
"A holoplicator."
"And what does it do?" Wentworth chug-a-lugged the rest of the pint and tossed the bottle into a
corner. "It doesn't matter what it does, because it only does it temporarily, and with respect to what I
invented it for, it doesn't do it at all. I failed."
"Kurilman didn't seem to think so. He bought you out. Why?"
"I don't know why."
"You know perfectly well why."
"All right. I know why now. But I didn't then."
"Is that the why of the wine?"
"Young lady, there is no why of the wine. Only the wine."
"I know," I said. "But you're only the second winehead I've ever known who admitted it."
"Who wash the first?"
"My father," I said and went out and closed the door.

"D. D. Rinehardt, as I live and breathe,” said the taller of the two executive types when I came out of
the breakfastmat next morning.
"Or is it Nancy Drew?" said the shorter, taking my arm and guiding me to the Sparrow parked
behind my Blue Jay.
I can smell IRS agents a mile away. Maybe it's the periwig powder they use. "Are we going for a
ride?"
"In the park."