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

like a pat of butter slqdding across hot Teflon.
Hiro, who as of thirty seconds ago is no longer the Deliverator, gets
out of the car and pulls his swords out of the trunk, straps them around his
body, prepares for a breathtaking nighttime escape run across TMAWH
territory. The border with Oakwood Estates is only minutes away, he has the
layout memorized (sort of), and he knows how these Burbclave cops operate,
because he used to be one. So he has a good chance of making it. But it's
going to be interesting.
Above him, in the house that owns the pool, a light has come
i8
SNOW CRASH
on, and children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows,
all warm and fuzzy in their Li'l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which
can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time.
Dad is emerging from the back door, pulling on a jacket. It is a nice
family, a safe family in a house full of light, like the family he was a
part of until thirty seconds ago.




Hiro Protagonist and Vitaly Chernobyl, roommates, are chilling out in
their home, a spacious 20-by-30 in a U-Stor-It in Inglewood, California. The
room has a concrete slab floor, corrugated steel walls separating it from
the neighboring units, and-this is a mark of distinction and luxury-a
roll-up steel door that faces northwest, giving them a few red rays at times
like this, when the sun is setting overLAX. From time to time, a 777 ora
Sukhoi/Kawasaki Hypersonic Transport will taxi in front of the sun and block
the sunset with its rudder, or just mangle the red light with its jet
exhaust, braiding the parallel rays into a dappled pattern on the wall.
But there are worse places to live. There are much worse places right
here in this U-Stor-It. Only the big units like this one have their own
doors. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a
maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. These are slum
housing, 5-by.lOs and 10-by-lOs where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and
parboil flstfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets.
It is whispered that in the old days, when the U-Stor~It was actually
used for its intended purpose (namely, providing cheap extra storage space
to Californians with too many material goods), certain entrepreneurs came to
the front office, rented out 1O.by-lOs using fake IDs, filled them up with
steel drums full of toxic chemical waste, and then abandoned them, leaving
the problem for the U~Stor-It Corporation to handle. According to these
rumors, U-Stor.It just padlocked those units and wrote them off. Now, the
immigrants claim, certain units remain haunted by this chemical specter. It
is a story they tell their children, to keep them from trying to break into
padlocked units.
NEAL STEPHENSON
19
No one has ever tried to break into Hiro and Vitaly's unit because
there's nothing in there to steal, and at this point in their lives, neither