"Crawford Killian - The Empire of Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Killian Crawford)

crowded off Earth to make room for Climbers like himself, but for a Senior Field
Agent to talk this way was too much.

Pierce was wryly aware of the reasons for his deliberate discourtesy. Philon

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reminded him of himself at twenty: an apprentice hatchetman, pleasantly aware
of his elite status but not yet experienced enough to begin to doubt the value of
his job. Something else about the young Dorian also bothered him, but he
couldn't identify it. A slight kinesic tension, a glint of hostility in the respectful
smile. He had seen it many times, usually in men preparing to try to kill him. But
in Philon such tension made no sense. Let it pass: an aftereffect, no doubt, of the
freeze.

The door opened, and Pierce stood up.

"After you, Philon."

"That's all right, I'm going on up to one twenty-one. Glad to have met you, Mr.
Pierce. I hope we'll meet again soon." Pierce waved a vague good-bye, and
walked into Wigner's outer office. For some reason, he did not entirely relax
until the elevator doors had closed behind him.

Floor 112 had for Pierce a pleasant air of lived-in luxury: good teak tables with
coffee rings marring their elegant surfaces; some early Booth cartoons, originals,
tacked on official bulletin boards; thick Danish carpets a bit overdue for
cleaning. Two dozen clerks, men and women, were running floods of data
through the flickertube terminals evenly spaced around the large main office.
The meter-square screens shimmered with a dozen colors, like high-speed
kaleidoscopes. The clerks were dressed in overalls, chitons, jeans, brocade robes;
their only common denominators seemed to be youth and a passion for
houseplants, which adorned the terminals like ivy on gravestones.

Holograms glowed on most walls and partitions: second-century Rome from the
air; the scrub forests of the Dogger Plain, where the Thames and Rhine merged

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and flowed north to the Norwegian Bight on Tharmas; a twelfth-century
Buddhist monk in Kyoto, all jolliness and wrinkles; a Paleo-Indian band
celebrating a good hunt in an Albionese Arizona swamp. The pictures had all
been taken by the staff of Floor 112, while vacationing; working Field Agents
had no time for travelogue holography.

There were no windows on Floor 112. The Operations Division was interested