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Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 89 из 425Audrey, who had always been yellowish and who now looked like a candidate for a liver transplant, snickered herself. Buddy gave us a librarian’s prim glare from the far end of the counter, where he was reading a flyer about the holiday NASCAR race at Oxford Plains. I drove back the way I had come. A big hamburger is a bad meal to eat in the middle of a hot day; it leaves you feeling sleepy and heavy-witted. All I wanted was to go home (I’d been there less than twenty-four hours and was already thinking of it as home), flop on the bed in the north bedroom under the revolving fan, and sleep for a couple of hours. When I passed Wasp Hill Road, I slowed down. The laundry was hanging listlessly on the lines, and there was a scatter of toys in the front yard, but the Scout was gone. Mattie and Kyra had donned their suities, I imagined, and headed on down to the public beachie. I’d liked them both, and quite a lot. Mattie’s short-lived marriage had probably hooked her somehow to Max Devote. .
but looking at the rusty doublewide trailer with its dirt driveway and balding front yard, remembering Mat-tie’s baggy shorts and Kmart smock top, I had to doubt that the hook was a strong one. Before retiring to Palm Springs in the late eighties, Maxwell William Devote had been a driving force in the computer revolution. It’s primarily a young people’s revolution, but Devore did okay for a golden oldie—knew the playing-field and understood the rules. He started when memory was stored on magnetic tape instead of in computer chips and a warehouse-sized cruncher called UNIVAC was state-of-the-art. He was fluent in COBOL and spoke FORTRAN like a native. As the field expanded beyond his ability to keep up, expanded to the point where it began to define the world, he bought the talent he needed to keep growing.
His company, Visions, had created scanning programs which could upload hard copy onto floppy disks almost instantaneously; it created graphic-imaging programs which had become the industry standard; it created Pixel Easel, which allowed laptop users to mouse-paint. . to actually fingerpaint, if their gadget came equipped with what Jo had called “the clitoral cursor.” Devore had invented none of this later stuff, but he’d understood that it could be invented and had hired people to do it. He held dozens of patents and co-held hundreds more. He was supposedly worth something like six hundred million dollars, depending on how technology stocks were doing on any given day.
On the TR he was reputed to be crusty and unpleasant. No surprise there; to a Nazarene, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And folks said he was eccentric, of course.
but looking at the rusty doublewide trailer with its dirt driveway and balding front yard, remembering Mat-tie’s baggy shorts and Kmart smock top, I had to doubt that the hook was a strong one. Before retiring to Palm Springs in the late eighties, Maxwell William Devote had been a driving force in the computer revolution. It’s primarily a young people’s revolution, but Devore did okay for a golden oldie—knew the playing-field and understood the rules. He started when memory was stored on magnetic tape instead of in computer chips and a warehouse-sized cruncher called UNIVAC was state-of-the-art. He was fluent in COBOL and spoke FORTRAN like a native. As the field expanded beyond his ability to keep up, expanded to the point where it began to define the world, he bought the talent he needed to keep growing.
His company, Visions, had created scanning programs which could upload hard copy onto floppy disks almost instantaneously; it created graphic-imaging programs which had become the industry standard; it created Pixel Easel, which allowed laptop users to mouse-paint. . to actually fingerpaint, if their gadget came equipped with what Jo had called “the clitoral cursor.” Devore had invented none of this later stuff, but he’d understood that it could be invented and had hired people to do it. He held dozens of patents and co-held hundreds more. He was supposedly worth something like six hundred million dollars, depending on how technology stocks were doing on any given day.
On the TR he was reputed to be crusty and unpleasant. No surprise there; to a Nazarene, can any good thing come out of Nazareth? And folks said he was eccentric, of course.