"Avram Davidson - Blunt" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davidson Avram)

representative of Big Business in' the county, the manager of a lumbering outfit
that was winding up operations, there being no forests left worth ravaging.

"We can use you out in . ," he said, naming a western state.

"You know I haven't got a license," Blunt said. The lumberman's reply was brief
and obscene.

"Can you set a broken leg? That's what counts," he continued.

On the advice of the lumberman Blunt went out to the western state and told the
company's hiring agent that he was a former medical student whom lack of
finances had forced out of school. His story, enriched with details from the
gossip of the Army doctors, sounded reasonable; but the company was not too
particular. Few doctors were available [or the rough life of the logging camp,
and the supply of those whom liquor, malpractice, or conviction for criminal
abortion made available was rather short at the time. He spent several years in
the woods before he moved on.

Once, he bought an interest in a small town drug store, chiefly to improve his
knowledge of pharmacy. He was not a businessman, and when his partner took to
tapping both the till and the spiritus frumenti, Blunt did not wait for the end,
but just walked out. There are agencies that never advertise, as their business,
though needful, is illegal. Through one of them Blunt became le docteur on a
sisal plantation in Haiti; he added, to the professional journals to which he
subscribed, one on tropical medicine.

All that he did, he did with seriousness and sincerity, and as much capability
as was possible under the circumstances -- which was a great deal more than the
medical monopolists could have afforded to admit, if they had ever known about
him. They never did, of course, because he went to places that never saw them.

Unlike the woman of Valor, who {we are assured on the best authority], Laugheth
at the Time to Come, Blunt never even thought about it. He was in British
Honduras when the European war broke out, but paid it little attention until the
invasion of Denmark and Norway by a people who might have eventually become
civilized, had the British in the early part of the previous century not
prevented the French from continuing to civilize them. Something stirred in the
heart of Huey P. Blunt as he read the accounts of the armed parachutists
dropping from the troubled sky. He went back to the United States and enlisted
in the Navy.

So there was Blunt at thirty-odd: big, balding, not very talkative, not much
booklearning, no licenses, but a lot of practical experience for a Pharmacist's
Mate, First Class. His advancement in rating was indefinitely postponed because
he lacked the requisite six months duty at sea or overseas required of chief
petty officers in "non-specialized" ratings. By the Byzantine logic of the Navy,
a Pharmacist's Mate, 1/c --who had to know First Aid, Minor Surgery,
Anaesthesia, Materia Medica, Anatomy, Physiology, Nursing, Hospital
Administration, Embalming, and so on -was not considered a specialist; while