"Robert A. Heinlein - The Door into Summer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

Pete said, тАЮWellll? YтАЩknow!тАЬ
I looked down at his waffle-scarred head. Pete wouldnтАЩt sue anybody; if he
didnтАЩt like the cut of another catтАЩs whiskers, he simply invited him to come out
and fight like a cat. тАЮI believe youтАЩre right, Pete. IтАЩm going to look up Miles,
tear his arm off, and beat him over the head with it until he talks. We can take
the Long Sleep afterward. But weтАЩve got to know just what it was they did to
us and who rigged it.тАЬ
There was a phone booth back of the stand. I called Miles, found him at
home, and told him to stay there; IтАЩd be out.
My old man named me Daniel Boone Davis, which was his way of declaring
for personal liberty and self-reliance. I was born in 1940, a year when
everybody was saying that the individual was on the skids and the future
belonged to mass man. Dad refused to believe it; naming me was a note of
defiance. He died under brainwashing in North Korea, trying to the last to
prove his thesis.
When the Six Weeks War came along I had a degree in mechanical
engineering and was in the Army. I had not used my degree to try for a
commission because the one thing Dad had left me was an overpowering
yen to be on my own, giving no orders, taking no orders, keeping no
schedules-I simply wanted to serve my hitch and get out. When the Cold War
boiled over, I was a sergeant-technician at Sandia Weapons Center in New
Mexico, stuffing atoms in atom bombs and planning what I would do when
my time was up. The day Sandia disappeared I was down in Dallas drawing
a fresh supply of Schrecklichkeit. The fall-out on that was toward Oklahoma
City, so I lived to draw my GI benefits.
Pete lived through it for a similar reason. I had a buddy, Miles Gentry, a
veteran called back to duty. He had married a widow with one daughter, but
his wife had died about the time he was called back. 1-fe lived off post with a
family in Albuquerque so as to have a home for his stepchild Frederica. Little
Picky (we never called her тАЮFredericaтАЬ) took care of Pete for me. Thanks to
the cat-goddess Bubastis, Miles and Picky and Pete were away on a
seventy-two that awful weekend-Ricky took Pete with them because I could
not take him to Dallas.
I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out we had divisions stashed
away at Thule and other places that no one suspected. It had been known
since the тАЪ30s that the human body could be chilled until it slowed down to
almost nothing. But it had been a laboratory trick, or a last-resort therapy,
until the Six Weeks War. IтАЩll say this for military research: if money and men
can do it, it gets results. Print another billion, hire another thousand scientists
and engineers, then in some incredible, left-handed, inefficient fashion the
answers come up. Stasis, cold sleep, hibernation, hypothermia, reduced
metabolism, call it what you will- the logistics-medicine research teams had
found a way to stack people like cordwood and use them when needed. First
you drug the subject, then hypnotize him, then cool him down and hold him
precisely at four degrees centigrade; that is to say, at the maximum density
of water with no ice crystals. If you need him in a hurry he can be brought up
by diathermy and posthypnotic command in ten minutes (they did it in seven
at Nome), but such speed tends to age the tissues and may make him a little
stupid from then on. If you arenтАЩt in a hurry two hours minimum is better. The
quick method is what professional soldiers call a тАЮcalculated risk.тАЬ