"Philip E. High - The Mad Metropolis" - читать интересную книгу автора (High Phillip E)

Police caller? No. The nearest one was just visible nearly a mile away at
the beginning of the next block; he'd never make it.

Cook stood there, trying to reason his way out of an impossible
situation and knowing he couldn't. Worse, this was not new; from all
accounts it happened quite frequently. A man offended an overseer or an
exec or fell down on his work quota and was summarily tried and expelled.
Then there were those rare young onesтАФusually hopped up with
lift-pillsтАФwho, out of bravado or stupidity, thought they could break the
block and survive in the city at night.

His own case was, of course, unique, but the result was the same. The
psychos knew, they knew that perhaps eight or nine times a night
someone was thrown out and they patrolled the streets, waiting.

No one worried about a Prole. They were the outcasts of the new
feudalism, the nightmare of the politician, the barrier to economic
recovery, the burden of the privileged classes. It had not come to pogroms
or mass extermination yet, but it had been talked about and was getting
very close indeed.
 The Proles! Six billion labor-class entities who, with an average I.Q. of
only ninety, could not be fitted into the structure of society, who had to be
carried by a sagging, groaning economic structure already on the verge of
collapse. What the hell could you do with them? Anything they could do
the machines could do six times as fast and twenty times more efficiently.
No wonder, despite government subsidies, the Combines often lost
patience and tossed some of the burden into the street.

Anyone found dead at dawn was immediately written off as an
accidental death without further enquiry.

Cook thought of these things as he fought off a mounting hysteria. The
desire to move, to tear himself away from the closed door, was almost
overwhelming. He wanted to run and keep running; he wanted to scream
and keep screaming. Oh God, I've got to hold on!

What for? What good would it do? He would never hold out until dawn,
and, even if he could stand still for nine solid hours, something would find
him long before that.

Nonetheless, he continued to stand there. A shadow against the wall, an
outline of a human being in the standard, ill-fitting one-piece proletarian
suit with its round black collar and indicative yellow arm bands.

He was a target, a specimen, a butterfly to be pinned down and made to
twitch by the first psycho who spotted him. That was the trouble with
psychos, although they lived in a world of fantasy, when it came to
exercising their particular perversion they wanted the real thing, and
hypnad variants wouldn't do.