"Ellison, Harlan - Pulling Hard Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

HARLAN ELLISON

PULLING HARD TINE

In the maximum security VR wings of New Alcatraz, there is no light. None is
needed. The prisoners are fed aerobiologically; five times a day the cells are
fine-sprayed with a dispersion of microscopically calibrated nutrients, pollens,
bacteria-inhibiting spores and microorganisms, cleansing agents, and
depilitants. All waste products gelate, coalesce, and are sucked out of the
null-gravity free fall enclosure through egress tiles in the sterile white pyrex
floor. Random items of furniture -- overstuffed easy chairs, end-table lamps,
swatches of astroturf, saki cups -- float relaxedly in the gentle air tides that
waft through the cells.

These non-penal artifacts have been stored in the cells. For the most part, they
are the property of Warden Emmanuel V. Burkis, a collector of household trinkets
from the past. They have been laded in the null-g maximum security cells, where
they share floating space with lifers paying their debt to society, because
storage space is at a premium in the one hundred per cent automated environs of
New Alcatraz. To take the job of overseeing the Rock, even at the handsome
figure paid annually by the Internment Department of the United

States government, Warden Burkis was gifted with unlimited shopping authority
for his hobby -- household trinkets from the past. It is a lonely and quiet
place, the Rock.

The lifers who occupy these cells never object to the floating furniture. They,
themselves, float. They exist in a transmundane virtual reality nexus, dreaming
their special dreams, bobbing and slowly turning in the vagrant breezes that
play forever through the VR wings. They are serving their lifetime sentences,
hanging in null-g oblivion, growing more grossly rotund and discolored by the
decade. They will bump against walls and wedge in triangular dead ends where
ceiling meets vertical tile surfaces, till one night, or one day, they will
expire in the middle of the special dream. And only through a death kept long at
bay, to assuage the demands of Society for retribution, will their sentences be
commuted. Commuted, that is, to a place (in the sentencing litany of the
Universal Penal Code) "far worse than the Hell in which they have served their
sentence." We are a nation in balance. *

Charlie was out back, feeding the chickens, when he heard Robin scream. He
dropped the tin bucket, spilling millet in a long swath. He ran back to the
restaurant shack in a panic, tripping and falling once.

As he came through the screen door at the rear of the shack, he saw the four men
tearing at Robin's clothes. They had her on her back on one of the tables, and
one of the leather-clad bikers had already ripped her blouse off. Her apron hung
off one ankle. Another had spread her legs, and was unzipping his roughout
pants, pushing between her thighs as the shortest of the four, a little man with