"Frank Herbert - Hellstrom's Hive" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The Agency.

No one ever called it anything else. The Agency's economic operations, the spying and other forms
of espionage only confirmed Janvert's early cynicism. He saw the world without masks, telling
himself that the great mass of his fellows had no realization whatsoever that they already lived in
what was, for all intents and purposes, a police state. This had been inevitable from the formation
of the first police state that achieved any degree of world power. The only apparent way to oppose
a police state was by forming another police state. It was a condition that fostered its mimic forces
on all sides (so Clovis Carr and Edward Janvert agreed). Everything they saw in the society took
on police-state character. Janvert said it. "This is the time of the police states."

They made this a tenet of their pact to leave the Agency together at the first opportunity. That their
feelings for each other and the pact thus engendered were dangerous, they had no doubts. To leave
the Agency would require new identities and a subsequent life of obscurity whose nature they
understood all too well. Agents left the service through death in action or a carefully guarded
retirement -- or they sometimes just disappeared and, somehow, all of their fellows got the message
not to ask questions. The most persistent retirement rumor in the Agency mentioned the farm;
decidedly not Hellstrom's farm. It was, instead, a carefully supervised rest home that none located
with precise geography. Some said northern Minnesota. The story described high fences, guards,
dogs, golf, tennis, swimming, splendid fishing on an enclosed lake, posh private cabins for
"guests," even quarters for married couples, but no children. Having children in this business was
considered equal to a death sentence.

Both Carr and Janvert agreed they wanted children. Escape would have to occur while they were
overseas together, they decided. Forged papers, new faces, money, the requisite language facility --
all of the physical necessities were within reach except one: the opportunity. And never once did
they suspect adolescent fantasy in such dreams -- nor in the work that occupied their lives. They
would escape -- someday.

Depeaux was objecting to something in Merrivale's briefing now. Janvert tried to pick up the
thread: something about a young woman trying to escape from Hellstrom's farm.

"Porter's reasonably certain they didn't kill her," Merrivale said. "They just took her back inside
that barn that we are told is the main studio for Hellstrom's movie operation."
From the Agency report on Project 40. The papers were dropped from a folder by a man identified
as a Hellstrom aide. The incident occurred in the MIT main library early last March as explained in
the covering notes. The label "Project 40" was scribbled at the top of each page. From an
examination of the notes and diagrams (see enclosure A), our experts postulate developmental
plans for what they describe as "a toroidal field disrupter." This is explained as an electron (or
particle) pump capable of influencing physical matter at a distance. The papers are, unfortunately,
incomplete. No definite line of development can be determined from them, although our own
laboratories are exploring the provocative implications. It seems obvious, however, that someone
in the Hellstrom organization is at work on an operational prototype. We cannot be certain (1)
whether it will work or (2) if it works, to what use it will be put. However, in view of Dr.
Zinstrom's report (see enclosure G) we must assume the worst. Zinstrom assures us privately that
the theory behind such a development is sound and that a toroidal field disrupter large enough,
amplified enough, and set to the correct resonance could shatter the earth's crust with disastrous