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

procedures for that window-and it should never be opened. Unless something
has gone wrong.
The window slides open and-you sitting down?-smoke comes out of it. The
Deliverator hears a discordant beetling over the metal hurricane of his
sound system and realizes that it is a smoke alarm, coming from inside the
franchise.
Mute button on the stereo. Oppressive silence-his eardrums uncringe-the
window is buzzing with the cry of the smoke alarm. The car idles, waiting.
The hatch has been open too long, atmospheric pollutants are congealing on
the electrical contacts in the back of the pizza slots, he'll have to clean
them ahead of schedule, everything is going exactly the way it shouldn't go
in the three-ring binder that spells out all the rhythms of the pizza
universe.
Inside, a football-shaped Abkhazian man is running to and fro, holding
a three-ring binder open, using his spare tire as a ledge to keep it from
collapsing shut; he runs with the gait of a man carrying an egg on a spoon.
He is shouting in the Abkhazian dialect; all the people who run CosaNostra
pizza franchises in this part of the Valley are Abkhazian immigrants.
It does not look like a serious fire. The Deliverator saw a real fire
once, at the Farms of Men-yvale, and you couldn't see anything for the
smoke. That's all it was: smoke, burbling out of nowhere, occasional flashes
of orange light down at the bottom, like heat lightning in tall clouds. This
is not that kind of fire. It is the kind of fire that just barely puts out
enough smoke to detonate the smoke alarms. And he is losing time for this
shit.
The Deliverator holds the horn button down. The Abkhazian manager comes
to the window. He is supposed to use the intercom to talk to drivers, he
could say anything he wanted and it would be piped straight into the
Deiverator's car, but no, he has
SNOW CRASH
to talk face to face, like the Deiverator is some kind of fucking ox
cart driver. He is red-faced, sweating, his eyes roll as he tries to think
of the English words.
4dA fire, a little one," he says.
The Deliverator says nothing. Because he knows that all of this is
going onto videotape. The tape is being pipelined, as it happens, to
CosaNostra Pizza University, where it will be arialyzed in a pizza
management science laboratory. It will be shown to Pizza University
students, perhaps to the very students who will replace this man when he
gets fired, as a textbook example of how to screw up your life.
"New employee-put his dinner in the microwave-had foil in it-boom!" the
manager says.
Abkhazia had been part of the Soviet fucking Union. A new immigrant
from Abkhazia trying to operate a microwave was like a deep-sea tube worm
doing brain surgery. Where did they get these guys? Weren't there any
Americans who could bake a fucking pizza?
"Just give me one pie," the Deiverator says.
Talldng about pies snaps the guy into the current century. He gets a
grip. He slams the window shut, strangling the relentless keening of the
smoke alarm.