"Heinlein, Robert A- Stranger in a Strange Land" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

"Do gangsters marry their molls? Or is it 'frails'? We'll see" She left hurriedly.

Jill Boardman placed the bug without difficulty. The patient in the adjacent room in the next corridor was bedfast; Jill often Stopped to gossip. She stuck it against the wall over a closet shelf while chattering about how the maids just never dusted high in the closets.
Removing the spool the next day and inserting a fresh one was just as easy; the patient was asleep. She woke while Jill was still perched on a chair and seemed surprised; Jill diverted her with a spicy and imaginary ward rumor.
Jill sent the exposed wire by mail, using the hospital's post office as the impersonal blindness of the postal System seemed safer than a cloak & dagger ruse. But her attempt to insert a third fresh spool she muffed. She had waited for a time when the patient was asleep but had just mounted the chair when the patient woke up. "Oh! Hello, Miss Boardman."
Jill froze with one hand on the wire recorder. "Hello, Mrs. Fritschlie," she managed to answer. "Have a nice nap?"
"Fair," the woman answered peevishly. "My back aches."
"I'll rub it."
"Doesn't help much. Why are you always fiddling around in my closet? Is something wrong?"
Jill tried to reswallow her stomach. The woman wasn't really suspicious, she told herself. "Mice," she said vaguely.
"'Mice?' Oh, I can't abide mice! I'll have to have another room, right away!"
Jill tore the little instrument off the closet wall and stuffed it into her pocket, jumped down from the chair and spoke to the patient. "Now, now, Mrs. Fritschlie-I was just looking to see if there were any mouse holes in that closet. There aren't."
"You're sure?"
"Quite sure. Now let's rub the back, shall we? Easy over."
Jill decided she could not plant the bug in that room again and concluded that she would risk attempting to place it in the empty room which was part of K-12, the Suite of the Man from Mars. But it was almost time for her relief before she was free again. She got the pass key.
Only to find that she did not need it; the door was unlocked and held two more marines; the guard had been doubled. One of them glanced up as she opened the door. "Looking for someone?"
"No. Don't sit on the bed, boys," she said crisply. "If you need more chairs, we'll send for them." She kept her eye on the guard while he got reluctantly up; then she left, trying to conceal her trembling.
The bug was still burning a hole in her pocket when she went off duty; she decided to return it to Caxton at once. She changed clothes, shifted it to her bag, and went to the roof. Once in the air and headed toward Ben's apartment she began to breathe easier. She phoned him in flight.
"Caxton speaking."
"Jill, Ben. I want to see you. Are you alone?"
He answered slowly, "I don't think it's smart, kid. Not now."
"Ben, I've got to see you. I'm on my way over."
"Well, okay, if that's how it's got to be."
"Such enthusiasm!"
"Now look, hon, it isn't that I-"
"'Bye!" She switched off calmed down and decided not to take it out on poor Ben-fact was they both were playing out of their league. At least she was-she should have stuck to nursing and left politics alone.
She felt better when she saw Ben and better yet when she kissed him and snuggled into his arms. Ben was such a dear-maybe she really should marry him. But when she tried to speak he put a hand over her mouth, then whispered close against her ear, "Don't talk. No names and nothing but trivialities. I may be wired by now."
She nodded and he led her into the living room. Without speaking she got out the wire recorder and handed it to him. His eyebrows went up when he saw that she was returning not just a spool but the whole works but he made no comment. Instead he handed her a copy of the afternoon Post.
"Seen the paper?" he said in a natural voice. "You might like to glance at it while I wash up."
"Thanks." As she took it he pointed to a column; he then left, taking with him the recorder. Jill saw that the column was Ben's own syndicated outlet.


THE CROW'S NEST

by Ben Caxton

Everyone knows that jails and hospitals have one thing in common: they both can be very hard to get out of. In some ways a prisoner is less cut off than a patient; a prisoner can send for his lawyer, can demand a Fair Witness, he can invoke habeas corpus and require the jailor to show cause in Open court.
But it takes only a simple NO VISITORS sign, ordered by one of the medicine men of our peculiar tribe, to consign a hospital patient to oblivion more thoroughly than ever was the Man in the Iron Mask.
To be sure, the patient's next of kin cannot be kept out by this device
-but the Man from Mars seems to have no next of kin. The crew of the ill-fated Envoy had few ties on Earth; if the Man in the Iron Mask- pardon me I mean the "Man from Mars"-has any relative who is guarding his interests, a few thousand inquisitive reporters (such as your present scrivener) have been unable to verify it.
Who speaks for the Man from Mars? Who ordered an armed guard placed around him? What is his dread disease that no one may catch a glimpse of him, nor ask him a question? I address you, Mr. Secretary General; the explanation about "physical weakness" and "gee-fatigue" won't wash; if that were the answer, a ninety-pound nurse would do as well as an armed guard.
Could this disease be financial in nature? Or (let's say it softly) is it political?


There was more, all in the same vein; Jill could see that Ben was deliberately baiting the administration, trying to force them to bring Smith out into the open. What that would accomplish she did not know, her own horizon not encompassing high politics and high finance. She felt, rather than knew, that Caxton was taking serious risk in challenging the established authorities, but she had no notion of the size of the danger, nor of what form it might take.
She thumbed through the rest of the paper. It was well loaded with follow-up stories on the return of the Champion. with pictures of Secretary General Douglas pinning medals on the crew, interviews with Captain van Tromp and other members of his brave company, pictures of Martians and Martian cities. There was very little about Smith, merely a medical bulletin that he was improving slowly but satisfactorily from the effects of his trip.
Ben came out and dropped some sheets of onion skin in her lap. "Here's another newspaper you might like to see," he remarked and left agan.
Jill soon saw that the other "newspaper" was a transcription of what her first wire had picked up. As typed out, it was marked "First Voice," "Second Voice," and so on, but Ben had gone back and written in names wherever he had been able to make attributions later. He had written across the top: "All voices, identified or not, are masculine."
Most of the items were of no interest. They simply showed that Smith had been fed, or washed, or massaged, and that each morning and afternoon he had been required to get up and exercise under the supervision of a voice identified as "Doctor Nelson" and a second voice marked "second doctor." Jill decided that this must be Dr. Thaddeus.
But one longish passage had nothing to do with the physical care of the patient. Jill read it and reread it: