"C M Kornbluth - The Luckiest Man In Denv" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

naked man slipped swiftly into the room, heading for the bed as he raised a ten-centimeter poignard. He
stopped in dismay when he realized that the bed was empty.

Reuben killed him with a bullet through the throat.

"But he doesn't look a bit like me," he said in bewilderment, closely examining the face. "Just in a general
way."

Selene said dully: "Almon told me people always say that when they see their doubles. It's funny, isn't it?
He looks just like you, really."

"How was my body to be disposed of?"

She produced a small flat box. "A shadow suit. You were to be left here and somebody would come
tomorrow."

"We won't disappoint him," Reuben pulled the web of the shadow suit over his double and turned on the
power. In the half-lit room, it was a perfect disappearance; by daylight it would be less perfect. "They'll
ask why the body was shot instead of knifed. Tell them you shot me with the gun from under the pillow.
Just say I heard the double come in and you were afraid there might have been a struggle."

She listlessly asked: "How do you know I won't betray you?"

"You won't, Selene." His voice bit. "You're broken."

She nodded vaguely, started to say something, and then went out without saying it.
Reuben luxuriously stretched in his narrow bed. Later, his beds would be wider and softer, he thought.
He drifted into sleep on a half-formed thought that some day he might vote with other generals on the
man to wear the five stars-or even wear them himself, Master of Denv.

He slept healthily through the morning alarm and arrived late at his regular twentieth-level station. He saw
his superior, May's man Oscar of the eighty-fifth level, Atomist, ostentatiously take his name. Let him!

Oscar assembled his crew for a grim announcement: "We are going to even the score, and perhaps a
little better, with Ellay. At sunset there will be three flights of missiles from Deck One."

There was a joyous murmur and Reuben trotted off on his task.

All forenoon he was occupied with drawing plutonium slugs from hyper-suspicious storekeepers in the
great rock-quarried vaults, and seeing them through countless audits and assays all the way to Weapons
Assembly. Oscar supervised the scores there who assembled the curved slugs and the explosive lenses
into sixty-kilogram warheads.

In mid-afternoon there was an incident. Reuben saw Oscar step aside for a moment to speak to a
Maintainer whose guard fell on one of the Assembly Servers, and dragged him away as he pleaded
innocence. He had been detected in sabotage. When the warheads were in and the Missilers seated,
waiting at their boards, the two Atomists rode up to the eighty-third's refectory.

The news of a near-maximum effort was in the air; it was electric. Reuben heard on all sides in tones of
self-congratulation: "We'll clobber them tonight!"