Spider Robinson - His Own Petard

VIP免费

2024-11-23 0 0 29.4KB 5 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

HIS OWN PETARD

"Steven, can you come over right away?" Ann's uncharacteristically flat, hollow

voice asked.

Some people find it odd that a science fiction writer, in this day and age, should

choose to live without a modem, a pager, or a fax machine. I'm of the opinion that

modern technology has made it too easy for people to get in touch with each other. I

concentrate for a living, or rather, I try my damnedest. But you have to have a

phone—at least, if you want to make a living. Damn it.

Well, that's why God made answering machines. It was a cold night outside, and I

had been hard at work when the phone rang. Ann was a friend: she knew I often

turned off the speaker on the machine so I could concentrate on writing with-out

interruption. She was a friend: she wouldn't be too disappointed if I didn't pick up

the call.

She was a good friend, and she sounded like she needed help badly ...

I hesitated with my hand an inch from the phone, thinking that the definition of

"friend" should be, "someone you don't have to make excuses to."

"Rubin's dead," her voice said. "I was there."

Well, that would have been more than enough to fetch me—at any time of day or

night, in any weather. But then she clinched it ... by bursting into tears.

I picked up the handset, said, "Fifteen min-utes," and hung up.

"Well," I said to my wife as I pulled on my shoes, "that was the most amazing call

of the month."

"Who was it?" Mariko asked obligingly. A good straight man is welcome when

you're in a hurry. "Ann. She says Rubin is down."

Her jaw dropped. "Billy Rubin? Dead?"

"Brown bread," I agreed. "She says she saw it happen."

"Wow. That is amazing."

I shook my head. "That's not the amazing part. Get this: she didn't sound happy

about it."

I left Mariko looking as puzzled as I was, and drove to Ann's place.

Ann is a science fiction writer too, just starting out. Tall, willowy, blonde,

pleasant-faced and good-natured, in her late twenties. She's had a few short stories

in small-press anthologies and fanzines, one real sale to Analog, and has had a novel

ostensibly sold to Charnel House for the last eighteen months, although they still

haven't given her a firm pub date yet. She's pretty good—good enough that if she

has incredible luck, and lives long enough, one day she might be as poor as I am. I

like her as a person, too. More important, my wife, who possesses a very subtly

calibrated Jerk Detector, also likes her.

She was in rotten shape when I arrived at her flat. Tear-tracked, half in the bag,

spattered with blood—Rubin's blood!—an uncapped half-empty bottle of vodka

next to an open bag of grass on the coffee table. She was wearing a swatch of

yellow POLICE-CRIME SCENE tape around her forehead like a ninja headband,

canted rakishly over one eye. Her eyes were dangerously bright, and her voice was

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

Spider Robinson - His Own Petard.pdf

共5页,预览1页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Spider Robinson - His Own Petard

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: