Стивен Кинг (Stephen King)Word Processor of the Gods by Stephen King
At first glance it looked like a Wang word processor -- it had a Wang keyboard and a Wang casing. It was only on second glance that Richard Hagstrom saw that the casing had been split open (and not gently, either; it looked to him as if the job had been done with a hacksaw blade) to admit a slightly larger IBM cathode tube. The archive discs, which had come with this odd mongrel, were not floppy at all; they were as hard as the 45's Richard had listened to as a kid.
"What in the name of God is that?" Una asked as he and Mr. Nordhoff lugged it over to his study piece by piece. Mr. Nordhoff had lived next door to Richard Hagstrom's brother's family... Roger, Belinda, and their boy, Jonathan.
"Something Jon built," Richard said. "Meant for me to have it, Mr. Nordhoff says. It looks like a word processor."
"Oh yeah," Nordhoff said. He would not see his sixties again and he was badly out of breath. "That's what he said it was, the poor kid... think we could set it down for a minute, Mr. Hagstrom? I'm pooped."
"You bet," Richard said, and then called to his son, Seth, who was tooling odd, atonal chords out of his Fender guitar downstairs -- the room Richard had envisioned as a "family room" when he had first paneled it had become his son's "rehearsal hall" instead.
"Seth!" he yelled. "Come give us a hand!"
Downstairs, Seth just went on warping chords out of the Fender. Richard looked at Mr. Nordhoff and shrugged, ashamed and unable to hide it. Nordhoff shrugged back as if to say Kids! Who expects anything better from them these days? Except they both knew that Jon -- poor doomed Jon Hagstrom, his crazy brother's son -- had been better.
"You were good to help me with this," Richard said.
Nordhoff shrugged. "What else has an old man got to do with his time? And 1 guess it was the least I could do for Johnny. He used to cut my lawn gratis, do you know that? I wanted to pay him, but the kid wouldn't take it. He was quite a boy." Nordhoff was still out of breath. "Do you think I could have a glass of water, Mr. Hagstrom?"
"You bet." He got it himself when his wife didn't move from the kitchen table, where she was reading a bodice-ripper paperback and eating a Twinkie. "Seth!" he yelled again. "Come on up here and help us, okay?"