"Keith Laumer - The Monitors" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

opening your mind to what we're trying to show you! We offer you, at last, what you've always
dreamed of but never expected -- perfect government, and you reject it because it did not spring,
miraculously, from those same imperfect functionaries who have victimized you over the years!"
"I had the same chance as anyone else to be headman," Blondel pointed out. "I just never
went in for politics."
"Politics -- by which you mean a semiformalized system for determining who will exploit the
substratum; a closed in- group of the initiated making a business of looting the common wealth - -
"
"That Socialist jargon gives me the sleepies, Mr. Frokinil," Blondel advised him.
"Can't I make you see it?" Frokinil frowned.
"Maybe I'm just too dumb to make a down payment on a bargain in gold bricks," Blondel
suggested. Frokinil flapped his arms.
"Here are you, a native of a world wealthy enough to fulfill your every material requirement,
member of a race biologically advanced enough to provide every intellectual and aesthetic
satisfaction. Yet you live in uncertainty, emotional impoverishment, even physical need, your own
potentialities unexplored and unfulfilled." Frokinil waved a hand in an expansive gesture. "What
we offer you is the inheritance due you, your innate right as a man to enjoy the best fruits of
existence."
"I've already got more rights than I know what to do with," Blondel protested. "Just turn me
loose and I'll get on with what I was doing. As it happens, I've got a lead on a job in Ecuador - - "
"Poof! - - I'm not referring to rewarding indolence with official doles or the legislation of artificial
social states. I'm speaking of making use of your potentialities!"
"What potentialities?"
"Can you walk a tightrope, Mr. Blondel?"
"No - - but -- "
"Can you play the piano, the violin, the oboe? Can you fence, juggle, carry out a qualitative
analysis, identify birdcalls, practice judo, medicine, or law? Can you type, ride a unicycle, deal
from the bottom of a deck, paint, sculpt, apply a proper finish to wood? Have you knowledge of
ceramics, bookbinding, pole vaulting, mountain climbing -- "
"No, but I can fly that airplane," Blondel got in.
Frokinil nodded, smiling his saddest smile. "So you can, Mr. Blondel, so you can." For some
reason, that seemed to end the conversation.
Later that afternoon, in a small classroom fitted with elaborate visual aids, Blondel dozed
fitfully as Frokinil lectured persuasively on the beauties of the new regime:
"It's what you've always wanted: wise, honest government," the invader concluded. "So won't
you join in now, and help rather than hinder the Liberation?"
"Howzzat?" Blondel came to with a start. "Oh, are you still here?"
"Mr. Blondel!" Frokinil wailed. "I don't think you're really trying to be fair!"
Blondel rose and stretched. "You just don't get the idea, Frocky," he said. "Look at it this way
... " He went to the blackboard, chalked two dots a foot apart.
"This is you Monitors," he indicated one dot. "This is me, over here." He pointed to the other.
"You can wipe me out." He erased his dot with a swipe of his hand. "But you can't move me over
to your dot." He scribed a circle around the latter. "That's your dot, and you're in it all alone ... "
He broke off at the look on Frokinil's face. The instructor was gripping the back of a chair; his
eyes were squeezed shut.
"Take ... take it away," he said in a choked voice.
Blondel looked around. "Take what away?"
"That ... that diagram. Erase it -- please -- quickly!"
Puzzled, Blondel complied.
"OK, it's gone. You can come out now."