"Ward Moore - It Becomes Necessary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore Ward)

 "Oh God," she said, "the opportunities I've had. When I consider my moderation, I'm amazed at my
opportunities. This time no doubt it's to serve my country."

She thought his pale eyes wavered just a little. "Well, it is your country."

"Is it? I understood, or read in the paper, or something, that my citizenship was voided."

He regarded her through partly closed lids. How silly, she thought; like a parlor hypnotist or
something: the hard look. Really, they picked the stupidest men for agents. It's a pattern, I guess. William
S. Hart, the frontier marshal, steel-eyed character. "That disability can be removed."

"What's done can be undone?"

"Sure. Sometimes. Especially in the case of native-born."

"The March on Washington can be reversed, the Defenders of the Constitution can bow out,
Regulations can be replaced by laws again, the disfranchised minorities can be reinfranchised, the dead
restored to life?"

He leaned back in the chair, obviously never meant to accommodate a man of his weight. "Little
lady," he said easily, "why do you bother your pretty head about crap like that? Sure, they lynched a few
coloreds and booted out a few Jews, but what's that between you and me?"

You just can't ever tell, she thought; I'd have sworn (an archaic expression) he was the type to say
between you and I. You never know, do you? "This": she began, hoping she was speaking judicially,
implacably, with a haughty calm which should make him quail, yet feeling pretty sure she was only
sounding feminine and hysterical, "is the destruction of a democratic system which may not have worked
too well but which was infinitely better (in kind, not just in degree) than the totalitarianism you replaced it
with. Monstrousness, brutality, beastliness, the killing or exiling of those who couldn't be numbed or
corrupted, moral and political bankruptcyтАФOh, hell, I can't talk about it without bleating like an orator
тАж"

"We all make mistakes," he said soothingly. "You have to admit the Defenders have done a lot of
good."

"Do I? The compulsion doesn't seem inescapable. Or have you a car around the corner that will
draw up in a minute to convince me?"

"Now, we don't do things like that. You've been reading those sensational limey papers."

"They are annoying, aren't they?" she taunted him, suddenly unafraid. "Too bad you can't suppress
them or take them over the way you did the Times and the Post-Dispatch and all the rest."

"If you love the English so much, why did you leave London? What are you doing in France?"

She had an impulse to stick out her tongue and say, Yah, don't you wish you knew? Try and find out.
Or to speak of the conflict inside her and the depression of spirit which had sent her across the Channel.
Instead she murmured, "England and France are allies. Along with the rest of the world, except the
United States and the Soviet Union."