"Philip Jose Farmer - Traitor to the Living" - читать интересную книгу автора (Farmer Phillip Jose)

citizen and very rich, went into the hospital overnight
for observation. He had a cut on his head and a ticket
for going through a stop sign. Lincks claimed he had
not been able to see the stop sign because of an obscuring
bush.
It was true that the city had failed to keep the bush
cropped and that a stranger might have missed it. Car-
fax could, however, prove that the old man had driven
this route many times. The only witness was a seventeen
year old who, it turned out, was drunk and driving
with a suspended license. And he had twice been
charged though not convicted of car stealing. The last
10
car he was supposed to have stolen had been from one
of Mr. Lincks's car lots. It was Lincks's own testimony,
given shortly after the policeman showed up, that
had resulted in the ticket for failure to stop. The claim
that Lincks was doing fifty was based on the youth's
testimony, and nothing he said was likely to be believed.

Two weeks ago, Mr. Lincks had flown to Los Ange- les and purchased three
hours of medium's time. On
returning to Busiris, he had been interviewed by Mrs.
Knowlton of the Journal-Star. Her article had quoted in
full Mr. Lincks's overwhelmingly favorable impression
of Western and MEDIUM. Mr. Lincks had indeed
talked to his late and dearly beloved wife, and now he
looked forward to seeing her "in the great beyond." He
was vague about the details of her description of the afterlife.
He had been mainly concerned in finding out if
she were happy and in assuring her that he would
never be happy until reunited with her and God. He
had also spent much time (at $5,000 per half-hour) in
telling her how well the automobile agency and his investments
were doing. The actual time spent talking to
her was about thirty minutes. It had taken two hours to
locate her and half an hour to establish her identity,
even though he had been sure from the first moment of
contact that it was his wife. The FCC required the
half-hour of identity-establishing if the session were not
free. Even the dead suffered from too much government
interference, Mr. Lincks said.
However, despite the heavy hand of the federal government
on free enterprise, MEDIUM certainly "exposed
the wrongness of those godless atheists who called
Mr. Western a crook and established the etemalness
and true verity of the Good Book."
Mr. Lincks had overlooked the fact that the majority
of Christian sects denied that it had been proved that
MEDIUM could get into contact with the dead.