"Joe Haldeman - Tool of the Trade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

the opinions of those around him, to bring them more in line with Soviet
principles. This being Cambridge in the sixties and seventies, though,
even a doctrinaire Marxist would have looked relatively inconspicuous.
And I always tried to be careful to temper my outlook with American
conventional wisdom. I could deplore "my" country's presence in
Vietnam, for instance, yet proclaim my sympathy for the unfortunate
lads who had been drafted to fight there.
But by 1971 I had spent half my life-all of my adult life-in
America, and a lot of my pro-American sympathies were not feigned.
This is not to say I was no longer a good Communist. That the
Revolution survived the enormity of Stalin's crimes proved to me its
durability, and its durability implied universality.
But American democracy was also surviving Vietnam, Nixon, and
the cultural schism of the sixties, and it seemed to me the system might
emerge from these adversities tempered rather than weakened.
Perhaps tempered in both senses of the word, amenable to detente and
the evolution of a more humane economic system.
(I was convinced that it would have to be evolution here, rather
than revolution. If there was going to be another American Revolution,
it would be to the right. That's where most of the guns were. Not even
the Russian Revolution was fought with ideas alone.)
So by this trick of the mind I was working in the best interests of
both my homeland and my adopted country. I suppose that's not a rare
accommodation for people in my shoes.
In fact, though, matters of espionage and conflicting allegiances
took up little of my time, while I was busy "creating background"-which
is to say, pursuing the professional and personal interests of a normal
American man. In 1971 I married Valerie, who had been one of my
most talented students (she teaches Abnormal at Boston U. now), and
although or because we have never had children, our marriage is a
model of love and sharing. Of course I never shared with her the basic
exotic details of my past and present. Perhaps I should have.

It was a mutual interest in hypnosis that brought Valerie and me
together. We happened to sit next to each other at a lecture on the
anesthetic uses of hypnotism and found out we were in the same
department. We meshed.
MIT reserves the winter break, New Year's Day to early
February, for LAP, Independent Activities Period. (Everything that
changes my life has three initials.) We decided to work with biof
eedback, then fashionable, to see whether a willing subject could put
himself into a deeper hypnagogic state by monitoring his own
physiological parameters.
As it turns out, I am not a good subject for hypnosis, not being
particularly artistic or imaginative or reflective. Valerie was all three-a
moody fantasizing artist/musician-and after a week of practice, mutual
conditioning, I could put her into a deep trance with a word and a
touch. I myself could barely manage a light trance after ten minutes of
monotonic reassurance, which was not reflection on her ability as a
hypnotist. I couldn't get as deep as she did even when I used illegally