"Нейл Стефенсон. Snow Crash (Снежная лавина, англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

The Deiverator has heard of these stickers. It takes hours to get them
off. Have to take the car into a detailing place, pay
NEAL STEPHENSON
trillions of dollars. The Deiverator has two things on his agenda now:
He is going to shake this street scum, whatever it takes, and deliver the
fucking pizza all in the space of

24:23

the next five minutes and thirty-seven seconds.
This is it-got to pay more attention to the road-he swings into the
side street, no warning, hoping maybe to whipsaw the Kourier into the street
sign on the corner. Doesn't work. The smart ones watch your front tires,
they see when you're turning, can't surprise them. Down Strawbridge Place!
It seems so long, longer than he remembered-natural when you're in a hurry.
Sees the glint of cars up ahead, cars parked sideways to the road-these must
be parked in the circle. And there's the house. Light blue vinyl clapboard
two-story with one-story garage to the side. He makes that driveway the
center of his universe, puts the Kourier out of his mind, tries not to think
about Uncle Enzo, what he's doing right now-in the bath, maybe, or taking a
crap, or making love to some actress, or teaching Sicilian songs to one of
his twenty-six granddaughters.
The slope of the driveway slams his front suspension halfway up into
the engine compartment, but that's what suspensions are for. He evades the
car in the driveway-rnust have visitors tonight, didn't remember that these
people drove a Lexus-cuts through the hedge, into the side yard, looks for
that shed, that shed he absolutely must not run into
it's not there, they took it down
next problem, the picnic table in the next yard
hang on, there's a fence, when did they put up a fence?
This is no time to put on the brakes. Got to build up some speed, knock
it down without blowing all this momentum. It's just a four-foot wooden
thing,
The fence goes down easy, he loses maybe ten percent of his speed. But
strangely, it looked like an old fence, maybe he made a wrong turn
somewhere-he realizes, as he catapults into an empty backyard swimming pooL
i6
SNOW CRASH
___________ If it had been full of water, that wouldn't have been so
bad, maybe the car would have been saved, he wouldn't owe CosaNostra Pizza a
new car. But no, he does a Stuka into the far wall of the pool, it sounds
more like an explosion than a crash. The airbag inflates, comes back down a
second later like a curtain revealing the structure of his new life: he is
stuck in a dead car in an empty pool in a TMAWH, the sirens of the
Burbclave's security police are approaching, and there's a pizza behind his
head, resting there like the blade of a guillotine, with 25:17 on it.
"Where's it going?" someone says. A woman.
He looks up through the distorted frame of the window, now rimmed with
a fractal pattern of crystallized safety glass. It is the Kourier talking to