"Dead Men Walking" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mcauley Paul J)

hundred people lived out here. Rugged pioneer families, hermits, a few
scientists, and some kind of Hindu sect that planted huge tracts of UmbrielТs
sooty surface with slow-growing lichenous vacuum organisms. After the war, the
Three Powers Alliance took over the science station on Ariel, one of the larger
moons, renamed it Herschel City, and built its maximum security facility in the
big graben close by. The various leaders and lynchpins of the revolution, who
had already spent two years being interrogated at Tycho, on EarthТs Moon, were
moved here to serve the rest of their life sentences of reeducation and moral
realignment. At first, the place was run by the Navy, but civilian contractors
were brought in after Elliot Graben was tented and the vacuum organism farms
were planted. Most were ex-Service people who had settled in the Outer System
after the war. I was one of them.
I had learned how to create fake identities with convincing histories during my
training; my latest incarnation easily passed the security check. For eight and
half years, Roy Bruce, guard third class, cricket breeder, amateur freestyle
climber, lived a quiet, anonymous life out on the fringe of the Solar System.
And then two guards stumbled across the body of Goether Lyle, who had been the
leader of the Senate of Athens, Tethys, when, along with a dozen other city
states in the Outer System, it had declared independence from Earth.
IТd known Goether slightly: an intense, serious man whoТd been writing some kind
of philosophical thesis in his spare time. His body was found in the middle of
the main highway between the facility and the farms, spreadeagled and naked,
spikes hammered through hands and feet. His genitals had been cut off and
stuffed in his mouth; his tongue had been pulled through the slit in his throat.
He was also frozen solidЧthe temperature out on the floor of the graben is
around minus one hundred and fifty degrees Centigrade, balmy compared to the
surface of Ariel, but still a lot colder than the inside of any domestic
freezer, so cold that the carbon dioxide given off by certain strains of vacuum
organisms precipitates out of the atmosphere like hoar frost. It took six hours
to thaw out his body for the autopsy, which determined that the mutilations were
postmortem. HeТd died of strangulation, and then all the other stuff had been
done to him.
I was more than thirty klicks away when Goether LyleТs body was discovered,
supervising a work party of ten prisoners, what we call a stick, that was
harvesting a field of vacuum organisms. ItТs important to keep the prisoners
occupied, and stoop labor out in the fields or in the processing plants leaves
them too tired to plan any serious mischief. Also, export of the high-grade
biochemicals that the vacuum organisms cook from methane in the thin atmosphere
helps to defray the enormous cost of running the facility. So I didnТt hear
about the murder until IТd driven my stick back to its block at the end of the
shift, and I didnТt learn all the gruesome details until later that evening, at
the sweat lodge.
In the vestigial gravity of worldlets like Ariel, where you can drown in a
shower and water tends to slosh about uncontrollably, sweat lodges, saunas, or
Turkish-style hamams are ideal ways to keep clean. You bake in steam heat, sweat
the dirt out of your pores, scrape it off your skin, and exchange gossip with
your neighbors and friends. Even in a little company town like Herschel City,
there are lodges catering for just about every sexual orientation and religious
belief. My lodge, #23, is for unattached, agnostic heterosexual males. That
evening, as usual, I was sitting with a dozen or so naked men of various ages