"Frank Herbert - Destination Void 2 The Jesus Incident" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

-- Raja Flattery, The Book of Ship


USUALLY, MORGAN Oakes took out his nightside angers and frustrations in long
strides down any corridor of the ship where his feet led him.

Not this time! he told himself.

He sat in shadows and sipped a glass of astringent wine. Bitter, but it washed
the taste of the ship's foul joke from his tongue. The wine had come at his
demand, a demonstration of his power in these times of food shortages. The
first bottle from the first batch. How would they take it groundside when he
ordered the wine improved?

Oakes raised the glass in an ancient gesture: Confusion to You, Ship!

The wine was too raw. He put it aside.

Oakes knew the figure he cut, sitting here trembling in his cubby while he
stared at the silent com-console beside his favorite couch. He increased the
light slightly.

Once more the ship had convinced him that its program was running down. The
ship was getting senile. He was the Chaplain/Psychiatrist and the ship tried to
poison him! Others were fed from shiptits -- not frequently and not much, but
it happened. Even he had been favored once, before he became Ceepee, and he
still remembered the taste -- richly satisfying. It was a little like the stuff
called "burst" which Lewis had developed groundside. An attempt to duplicate
elixir. Costly stuff, burst. Wasteful. And not elixir -- no, not elixir.

He stared at the curved screen of the console beside him. It returned a dwarfed
reflection of himself: an overweight, heavy-shouldered man in a one-piece suit
of shipcloth which appeared vaguely gray in this light. His features were
strong: a thick chin, wide mouth, beaked nose and bushy eyebrows over dark
eyes, a bit of silver at the temples. He touched his temples. The reduced
reflection exaggerated his feeling that he had been made small by Ship's
treatment of him. His reflection showed him his own fear.

I will not be tricked by a damned machine!

The memory brought on another fit of trembling. Ship had refused him at the
shiptits often enough that he understood this new message. He had stopped with
Jesus Lewis at a bank of corridor shiptits.
Lewis had been amused. "Don't waste time with these things. The ship won't
feed us."

This had angered Oakes. "It's my privilege to waste time! Don't you ever
forget that!"

He had rolled up his sleeve and thrust his bare arm into the receptacle. The