"C M Kornbluth - The Little Black Bag" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

She was thinking hard. "Don't fly off the handle, doc. I don't get this but something's going on all right . . .
would those guys know good stuff if they saw it?"

"They would. They make a living from it. Wherever this kit came from-"

She seized on that, with a devilish faculty she seemed to have of eliciting answers without asking
questions. "I thought so. You don't know either, huh? Well, maybe I can find out for you. C'mon in here.
I ain't letting go of that thing. There's money in it-some way, I don't know how, there's money in it." He
followed her into a cafeteria and to an almost empty corner. She was oblivious to stares and snickers
from the other customers as she opened the little black bag- it almost covered a cafeteria table-and
ferreted through it. She picked out a retractor from a loop, scrutinized it, contemptuously threw it down,
picked out a speculum, threw it down, picked out the lower half of an 0. B. forceps, turned it over, close
to her sharp young eyes-and saw what the doctor's dim old ones could not have seen.

All old Dr. Full knew was that she was peering at the neck of the forceps and then turned white. Very
carefully, she placed the half of the forceps back in its loop of cloth and then replaced the retractor and
the speculum. "Well?" he asked. "What did you see?"

'Made in U.S.A.,' "she quoted hoarsely. " 'Patent Applied for July 2450.'

He wanted to tell her she must have misread the inscription, that it must be a practical joke, that- But he
knew she had read correctly. Those bandage shears: they had driven his fingers, rather than his fingers
driving them. The hypo needle that had no hole. The pretty blue pill that had struck him like a thunderbolt.




"You know what I'm going to do?" asked the girl, with sudden animation. "I'm going to go to charm
school. You'll like that, won't ya, doc? Because we're sure going to be seeing a lot of each other."

Old Dr. Full didn't answer. His hands had been playing idly with that plastic card from the kit on which
had been printed the rows and columns that had guided him twice before. The card had a slight
convexity; you could snap the convexity back and forth from one side to the other. He noted, in a daze,
that with each snap a different text appeared on the cards. Snap. "The knife with the blue dot in the
handle is for tumors only. Diagnose tumors with your Instrument Seven, the Swelling Tester. Place the
Swelling Tester-" Snap. "An overdose of the pink pills in Bottle 3 can be fixed with one pill from bottle-"
Snap. "Hold the suture needle by the end without the hole in it. Touch it to one end of the wound you
want to close and let go. After it has made the knot, touch it-" Snap. "Place the top half of the O.B.
Forceps near the opening. Let go. After it has entered and conformed to the shape of-" Snap.



The slot man saw "FLANNERY 1-MEDICAL" in the upper left corner of the hunk of copy. He
automatically scribbled "trim to .75" on it and skimmed it across the horseshoe-shaped copy desk to
Piper, who had been handling Edna Flannery's quack-expos├й series. She was a nice youngster, he
thought, but like all youngsters she over-wrote. Hence, the "trim."

Piper dealt back a city hall story to the slot, pinned down Flannery's feature with one hand and began to
tap his pencil across it, one tap to a word, at the same steady beat as a teletype carriage traveling across