"Blish, James - To Pay the Piper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blish James)

To Pay the Piper

THE MAN in the white jacket stopped at the door marked
Re-Education ProjectCol. H. H. Mudgett, Commanding
Officer and waited while the scanner looked him over. He
had been through that door a thousand times, but the scanner
made as elaborate a job of it as if it had never seen him
before.
It always did, for there was always in fact a chance that it
had never seen him before, whatever the fallible human beings
to whom it reported might think. It went over him from gray,
crew-cut poll to reagent-proof shoes, checking his small wiry
body and lean profile against its stored silhouettes, tasting and
smelling him as dubiously as if he were an orange held in
storage two days too long.
"Name?" it said at last.
"Carson, Samuel, 32-454-0698."
"Business?"
"Medical director, Re-Ed One."
While Carson waited, a distant, heavy concussion came
rolling down upon him through the mile of solid granite above
his head. At the same moment, the letters on the doorand
everything else inside his cone of visionblurred distressingly,
and a stab of pure pain went lancing through his head. It was
the supersonic component of the explosion, and it was harm-
lessexcept that it always both hurt and scared him.
The light on the door-scanner, which had been glowing
yellow up to now, flicked back to red again and the machine
began the whole routine all over; the sound bomb had reset it.
Carson patiently endured its inspection, gave his name, serial
number, and mission once more, and this time got the green.
He went in, unfolding as he walked the flimsy square of cheap
paper he had been carrying all along.
Mudgett looked up from his desk and said at once: "What
now?"
The physician tossed the square of paper down under
Mudgett's eyes. "Summary of the press reaction to Hamelin's
speech last night," he said. "The total effect is going against
us, Colonel. Unless we can change Hamelin's mind, this outcry
to re-educate civilians ahead of soldiers is going to lose the
war for us. The urge to live on the surface again has been
mounting for ten years; now it's got a target to focus on.
Us."
Mudgett chewed on a pencil while he read the summary;
a blocky, bulky man, as short as Carson and with hair as
gray and close-cropped. A year ago, Carson would have told
him that nobody in Re-Ed could afford to put stray objects
in his mouth even once, let alone as a habit; now Carson just
waited. There wasn't a manor a woman or a childof