"Alan Dean Foster - Humanx 5 - Sentenced To Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

The door recognized him and let him through. As he entered the foyer his suit
automatically adjusted to the warmer temperature inside. At the touch of a
button on his right wrist, his visor and hood folded back into the neck of his
suit, forming a neat high collar of the style favored by British admirals of
the
seventeenth century.
By the time the elevator deposited him on the fortieth floor the suit had
dried
itself and removed its own wrin-kles.
Nothing in his appearance suggested that he'd spent the previous half hour
strolling through a whirlwind. Sam-stead's weather was the reason for the
invention of the Samstead duty suit. What had evolved from necessity had been
metamorphosed by custom and fashion into some-thing considerably more
elaborate.
Scientific invention had unintentionally paved the way for the establishment
of
a social convention that was unique to Samstead.
Seram Machoka was waiting for him. Since no desk was visible in the
president's
office, it was apparent that the meeting was going to be conducted on an
informal basis. That suited Evan just fine. He was at his best when the
diplomatic niceties did not have to be observed.
He walked right in, unchallenged by human or mechan-ical intervention. It all
looked very casual, but his prog-ress was being monitored by company security.
There was no reason to stop him. He was a known company man, in a known
company
suit.
Machoka smiled and waved Evan to a couch with-out rising from the lounger on
which he reclined. Then he turned away as if suddenly disinterested to look
through the transparent outside wall at the storm still engulfing the city.
He was wearing a supervisorial communicator's suit modified to resemble
leather.
A series of concentric cir-cles and alternating bands of yellow and white
decorated the upper half of the suit, rising from his waistband to his right
shoulder. The left side of the suit bulged slightly. It was stuffed with
tactile
controls and contact points. A desk was nothing more than a quaint formality.
Machoka's suit could put him in contact with every division of the company.
Evan waited patiently, supremely confident as always but hard pressed to
restrain his curiosity. He'd never met Machoka before. There had been no
reason
for the two men to meet. Evan was an employee of the company and Machoka its
president. They moved on different levels. Now there was reason for those
levels
to interact, and he was intrigued.
His colleagues at work had teased him about the sum-mons though Evan wasn't
easy
to tease. That was part of his personality, the part that sometimes angered
those who didn't know him and put off those who did. He couldn't understand
why