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

the roller. He wasn't exactly reading it this first time. He was just looking at the letters and words to find
out whether, as letters and words, they conformed to Herald style. The steady tap of his pencil ceased at
intervals as it drew a black line ending with a stylized letter "d" through the word "breast" and scribbled in
"chest" instead, or knocked down the capital "E" in "East" to lower case with a diagonal, or closed up a
split word-in whose middle Flannery had bumped the space bar of her typewriter-with two curved lines
like parentheses rotated through ninety degrees. The thick black pencil zipped a ring around the "30"
which, like all youngsters, she put at the end of her stories. He turned back to the first page for the
second reading. This time the pencil drew lines with the stylized "d's" at the end of them through
adjectives and whole phrases, printed big "L's" to mark paragraphs, hooked some of Flannery's own
paragraphs together with swooping recurved lines.

At the bottom of "FLANNERY ADD 2-MEDICAL" the pencil slowed down and stopped. The slot
man, sensitive to the rhythm of his beloved copy desk, looked up almost at once. He saw Piper squinting
at the story, at a loss. Without wasting words, the copy reader skimmed it back across the masonite
horseshoe to the chief, caught a police story in return and buckled down, his pencil tapping. The slot man
read as far as the fourth add, barked at Howard, on the rim: "Sit in for me," and stamped through the
clattering city room toward the alcove where the managing editor presided over his own bedlam.




The copy chief waited his turn while the makeup editor, the pressroom foreman and the chief
photographer had words with the M . E. When his turn came, he dropped Flanneiy's copy on his desk
and said: "She says this one isn't a quack."

The M.E. read:

"FLANNERY 1-MEDICAL, by Edna Flannery, Herald Staff Writer.

"The sordid tale of medical quackery which the Herald has exposed in this series of articles undergoes a
change of pace today which the reporter found a welcome surprise. Her quest for the facts in the case of
today's subject started just the same way that her exposure of one dozen shyster M.D. 's and
faith-healing phonies did. But she can report for a change that Dr. Bayard Full is, despite unorthodox
practices which have drawn the suspicion of the rightly hypersensitive medical associations, a true healer
living up to the highest ideals of his profession.

"Dr. Full's name was given to the Herald's reporter by the ethical committee of a county medical
association, which reported that he had been expelled from the association, on July 18, 1941 for
allegedly 'milking' several patients suffering from trivial complaints. According to sworn statements in the
committee's files, Dr. Full had told them they suffered from cancer, and that he had a treatment which
would prolong their lives. After his expulsion from the association, Dr. Full dropped out of their sight-until
he opened a midtown 'sanitarium' in a brownstone front which had for several years served as a rooming
house.

"The Herald's reporter went to that sanitarium, on East 89th Street, with the full expectation of having
numerous imaginary ailments diagnosed and of being promised a sure cure for a flat sum of money. She
expected to find unkept quarters, dirty instruments and the mumbo-jumbo paraphernalia of the shyster
M.D. which she had seen a dozen times before.

"She was wrong.