"C M Kornbluth - Make Mine Mars UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)
That wasn't exactly what I'd meant; I'd always taken it for granted that port officers didn't loot anybody's baggage, no matter whose friends they were or weren't. As Chenery had said, it seemed to be a shiftless, easy-going place. I let him lead the way; he had a jeep watting to take us to the administration building, a musty, too-tight hodgepodge of desks. A tot of them were vacant, and the dowdy women and fattish men at the others, didn't seem to be very busy. The women were doing then- nails or reading; the men mostly were playing blotto with pocket-size dials for small change. A couple were sleeping.
From the administration building a jet job took us the 20 kilos to-town. Frostbite, the capital of Frostbite, housed maybe 40,000 people. No pressure dome. Just the glorious outdoors, complete with dust, weather, bisects, and a steady, icy wind. Hick towns seem to be the same the universe over. There was a main street called Main Street with clothing ibops and restaurants, gambling houses, and more or less fancy saloons, a couple of vaudeville theaters, and dance bafls. At the unfashionable end of Main Street were some Cum implement shops, places to buy surveying instruments and geologic detectors and the building that housed the Inter-MeQar News Service Frostbite Bureau. It was a couple of front rooms on the second floor, with a mechanical dentist Wow, an osteopath above, and a "ride-up-and-save" parka Хnporium to the rear.
Chenery let me in, and it was easy to see at once why Kennedy had died of pneumonia. Bottles. The air conditioning must have carried away every last sniff of liquor, but k itUl seemed to me that I could smell the rancid, homebrew stuff he'd been drinking. They were everywhere, the rdics of a shameless, hopeless alcoholic who'd been good for nothing better than Frostbite. Sticky glasses and bottles werywhere told the story.
I slid open the hatch of the incinerator and started tossing down bottles and glasses from the copy desk, the morgue, the Mbertype. Chenery helped, and decently kept his mouth
shut. When we'd got the place kind of cleaned up I wanted to know what the daily routine was like.
Chenery shrugged. "Anything you make ft, 1 guess. 1 used to push Kennedy to get more low-temperature agriculture stories for us. And those yaks that landed with you started as a civic-betterment stunt the Phoenix ran. It was all tractors until our farm editor had a brainstorm and brought in a pair. It's a hell of a good ideaЧyou can't get milk, butter and meat out of a tractor. Kennedy helped us get advice from some Earthside agronomy station to set it up and helped get clearance for the first pair too. I don't have much idea of what copy he filed back to ISN. Frankly, we used him mostly as a contact man."
I asked miserably: "What the hell kind of copy can you file from a hole like this?" He laughed and cheerfully agreed that things were pretty slow.
"Here's today's Phoenix," he said, as the faxer began to hum. A neat, 16-page tabloid, stapled, pushed its way out in a couple of seconds. I flipped through it and asked: "No color at all?"
Chenery gave me a wink. "What the subscribers and advertisers don't know won't hurt them. Sometimes we break down and give them a page-one color pic."
I studied the Phoenix. Very conservative layoutЧnaturally. It's competition that leads to circus makeup, and the Phoenix was the only sheet on the planet. The number-one story under a modest two-column head was an ISN farm piece on fertilizers for high-altitude agriculture, virtually unedited. The number-two story was an ISN piece on the current United Planets assembly.
"Is Frostbite in the UP, by the way?" I asked. "No. It's the big political question here. The Phoenix is against applying. We figure the planet can't afford the assessment in die first place, and if it could there wouldn't be anything to gain by joining."
"Urn." I studied the ISN piece closer and saw that the Phoenix was very much opposed indeed. The paper had doctored our story plenty. I hadn't seen the original, but ISN isЧin fact and according to its charterЧas impartial as it's humanly possible to be. But our story, as it emerged in the Phoenix, consisted of: a paragraph about an undignified, wrangling debate over the Mars-excavation question; a fist-fight between a Titanian and an Earth delegate in a corridor;
"1 suppose," I supposed, "that the majority of the planet is stringing along with the Phoenix?"
"Eight to one, the last time a plebiscite was run off," said Chenery proudly.
"You amaze me." I went on through the paper. It was about 70 per cent ads, most of them from the Main Street stores we'd passed. The editorial page had an anti-UP cartoon showing the secretary-general of the UP as the greasy, affable conductor of a jetbus jammed to the roof with passengers. A sign on the bus said* "Fare, $15,000,000 and up per year." A road sign pointing in the direction the bus was heading said, "To Nowhere." The conductor was saying to Х small, worried-looking man in a parka labeled "New Agricultural Planets" that, "There's always room for one morel!" The outline said: "But is thereЧand is it worth it?"
The top editorial was "a glowing tribute from the Phoenix to the Phoenix for its pioneering work in yaks, pinned on the shipment that arrived today. The second editorial was anti-UP, echoing the cartoon and quoting from the Sirian in the page-one ISN piece.
It was a good, efficient job of the kind that turns a working newsman's stomach while he admires the technique.
"Well, what do you think of it?" asked Chenery proudly.
I was saved from answering by a brrp from the ethertype.
"GPM FRB GA PLS" it said. "Good-afternoon, Frostbite BureauЧgo ahead, please." What with? I hunted around and found a typed schedule on the wall-that Kennedy had evidently once drawn up in a spasm of activity.
"MIN PLS" I punched out on the ethertype, and studied ftesked.
It was quite a document.
0900-1030: BREAKFAST
1030-1100: PHONE WEEMS FOR BITCHES RE SVS
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