"Gordon R. Dickson - The Outposter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter One

The line of those cast out of paradise was three miles long. It stretched along beside the tall wire fence in
the drizzling rain, and the unit driver delivering the newly graduated out-poster to the transport ship had to
check blowers and honk several times before the line would part enough opposite the final gate in the
fence to let the unit through to the pas-senger side.

Once through both line and gate he turned and drove on the safe side of the fence up to the passenger
boarding stairs. The line closed again where it had opened. The gate relocked itself. None of those who
had moved bothered to look after the unit. There was a common numbness to them all. It was as if the
dark autumn day under the cloud-thick skies had washed all the colour of life out of them, leav-ing them
as drab and chill asitself .

There were now no tears to be seen among them. They moved like people too stupefied for weeping.
Those who were going as partners, either because their numbers had been drawn together or because a
wife or husband had volunteered to accompany a lotteried mate, held to each other's hands. But that was
all.

There was almost no talking. Nearly every-one in the line, from the eighty-year-old lady with the twisted,
arthritic fingers to the big young man in the red and gold half coat with the wide, fashionably padded
shoulders, carried somethingтАФa small overnight case, a brown paper envelope, or a box gift wrapped
with bright paper and coloured ribbon. The big young man in red and gold carried a bottle of
sixty-three-year-old cognac, holding it in both hands before him as if he could not make up his mind
whether to open it just then or not.

In fact, he could not make up his mindтАФnot so much because the decision was a large one, but because
two things were at war with him at once, beneath the dispirited indifference that affected them all. He had
refused all drugs, but he had let himself drink heavily the night before, which had been as large an
eve-ning as he could make it, seeing it was his last on Earth. Therefore, he was sick and vise-headed with
the pain of a hangover, and one part of him wanted to open the bottle of cognac to get at the liquor that
would help him feel better.

The other part of him that was in conflict with this, however, had something to do with his name, which
was Jarl Rakkal. It was a very well-known name, and during the previous three days of indoctrination
some of the other drafted colonists had even come up to him for autographs. They had stopped com-ing
when they began to see that he got no better treatment thanthemselves . The Rak-kals were well known
in banking circles on Earth, and he had won his own recognition apart from that as publisher of the most
suc-cessful parti-fax mag to emerge in ten years. He still did not know how his political connec-tions had
failed to keep his number out of the lottery. By name and position he should have been doubly secure. Of
course, it could have been the doing of his relatives, who had dis-liked and been ashamed of him. But
that no longer mattered. What did matter, now that it was too late, was that being who he was he should
be above needing any kind of artificial solace or anesthesiaтАФeven to help a hangover as bad as this
oneтАФon this boarding day. He was a winner and should not need comforting, even self-administered
comforting.

So, he moved along in the slow line, at mo-ments remembering his hangover and instinc-tively starting to
unscrew the top of the bottle, then remembering who he was and checking the twisting fingers.