The Annals of the Heechee

Начало книги

It isn’t easy to begin. I thought of a whole bunch of different ways to do it, like cute:

You don’t know about me without you have read some books that was made by Mr. Fred Pohl. He told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. But my friendly data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein, says I’m too prone to obscure literary references anyway, so the Huckleberry Finn gambit was out. And I thought of starting with a searing expression of the soul-searching, cosmic angst that’s always (as Albert also reminds me) so much a part of my normal conversation:

To be immortal and yet dead; to be almost omniscient and nearly omnipotent, and yet no more real than the phosphor flicker on a screen-that’s how I exist. When people ask what I do with my time (so much time! so much of it crammed into each second, and with an eternity of seconds), I give them an honest answer. I tell them that I study, I play, I plan, I work. Indeed, that is all true. I do all these things. But during and between them I do one other thing. I hurt.

Читать дальше →