"SD Gottesman - Firepower" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gotlieb Phyllis)

through the hours of the day in a stately dance that was never twice the same in
even the smallest step.
Grouped on a lofty platform the heroically proportioned figures were the focus
of every visitor to the wonder-city of all time and space. There was absolutely
nothing like them in the universe, nothing like their marvelous grace that would
balance a three-ton male on his toes while whirling a two-ton female partner in
a vast arc, all to the most subtly exquisite music that could be evolved from
supertheramins and electroviolas. The music too was completely automatic. The
divine harmonies came from nothing more than a revolving drum which selected at
random sequences of tones and the companion coloring of the lights that flooded
the statues in their dance.
In a glassed restaurant Bartok and Babe were dining. Through the walls filtered
enough of the music to furnish a subdued background to lovers' talk. But when
these two got together it was business. As the wing commander had said, it was
something in the blood.
"MacNeice," snapped Bartok, "I am pot arguing with you, I'm telling you. You are
not going to do any such damfool thing as walk in on our piratical friends and
confront them with what you doubtless think of as 'The Papers'. I'm going to get
this me]odrama out of your head if I have to beat it out."
The girl's face was flushed and angry. "Try that and you'll get yours with an
Orban," she snapped. "I say that if you bring it right home to them that we're
on their tails they'll give up without a struggle and we've saved so many lives
and so much fuel that a medal for me will be in order."
"The cruiser," said Bartok, "leaves tonight. And that settles everything.
Forget, child, that this wing of the service was once its brains instead of its
eyes and ears. We are now offlcially an appendage devoted to snooping, and the
glorious history of the Intelligence Division is behind us."
"Fitzjames," she muttered, gritting her teeth. "I'd like to take that Admiral of
the Fleet by his beard and tear his head off. And don't tell me you aren't in
the project body and soul." Mocking his tones she said: "I know better."
"Off the record," admitted Bartok, "I may opine that our tiny suite of offces
has more brains in its charladies' little fingers than the entire ftghting
forces have in all the heads of all the commanders of all their milelong
battlewagons. That is, naturally, gross overstatement and pure sentimentality on
my part. Eat your Marsapples and shut up."
She bit viciously into one of the huge fruit and swallowed convulsively, her
eyes drifting through the glass wall to the living statues. They were performing
a sort of minuet, graceful beyond words, to an accompaniment from the theramins
in the manner of Mozart.
"And what's more," barked the wing commander in an angry afterthought, "the body
of the space navy could dispense with us at will, whereas without them we'd be
lost. You can't exist for the purpose of making reports to nobody. What good
would your spying have done if there hadn't been any cruiser to be sent off to
bomb Allison's capital city ?"
"None at all," she snapped at him. "Only I don't like the job if it has to mean
taking guff from every half-witted ensign who graduated because he knows how to
work an Auto-Crammer. Barty, you know and I know that they hate us and check up
on everything we send in. The-- the sneaks !" Abruptly she was weeping. The wing
commander, indecisively, passed her a handkerchief. Women ! he was thinking.
Sometimes they could be thoroughly opaque to reason. Any man could see through