"Philip E. High - The Prodigal Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (High Phillip E)

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The Prodigal Sun by
Philip E. High
CHAPTER ONE
THEY HAD NOT named the age, in truth there were few words to
describe it. The world had known times of plenty and times of famine,
ages of freedom and years of dictatorship. There had even been brief, if
localized, periods of near perfection but this was not one of them.

This period took the worst, threw them together and made quite sure
that nothing good got in.

It was not really the world's fault, having been pitchforked into it.
Mankind had just concluded its first interstellar war but the word
"victory" was purely relative.

True the enemy was flat on its back and quite helpless but Earth had
come out of the encounter on all fours. Today, five years after the enemy's
unconditional surrender, Earth was still licking its wounds and unable to
climb to its knees.

The race was sick, sick of its leaders and sick of each other. Its gut
ached from over-doses of expediency and its sinews creaked with the
bitterest cynicisms.

Whether the men in the long conference room were products or victims
of the age is an academic question and wholly irrelevantтАФit didn't make
them any nicer. They were mean, hard men, uninfluenced by any
consideration save advancement in their wholly personal rat-race.

This was the age of dog-eat-dog, here the cheap chiseler, the terrorist
and the extortioner blossomed like flowers on a refuse heap.

First there was General Statten, a harsh little man with beady eyes and
the face of an irritable peanut. The General wore a smart uniform,
impressive rows of ribbons and decorations but he had flown a desk in an
impregnable H.Q. two thousand feet under the Andes. He was a political
general, a brilliant organizer with a singular ability for discrediting those
immediately above him. Station's climb to the top had been a
tour-de-double-cross.

Facing him was Dowd, the industrialist, who had, during the years of
sorrow, acquired a financial empire without parallel in human history.