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

girl. How about it?"

"How about what? What do you want?"

"Hardly anything at all. Nothing dangerous. You still in that long hair committee?"

It would be so easy to upstage him; all the formulas walked through her mind: What committee? Oh,
you mean Americans Exiled for FreedomтАФthe AEF? Well, naturally тАж Of course a man like you тАж I
suppose you've run out of local victims; now you've gone into the overseas trade тАж let's end this little
chat right here, shall we? тАж Any one of these gambits would lead to the same end game. Was it
conceivable she could be betrayed by simple biological weakness? Could she find herself in bed with a
Defender? (Will Rock Hudson get girl?) Why, he was not even faintly physically attractive. When you
had been living alone for a long timeтАФfor such an interminably long timeтАФyou began thinking like a man,
feeling as a man does. Disgusting. "Yes. I suppose you want their names, addresses, letter-drops?"

(What an absurdity; it only went to show how far nature imitated pulp fiction. As though the AEF
were a cohesive, dedicated body instead of a number of wrangling, petulant groups, forming and
reforming, changing factions, dissatisfied and impotent. The Defenders, having conspired
melodramatically and achieved power through their ludicrous conspiracy, believed their opponents must
have remodeled themselves in their image. A government which could imagine the dilettantes of the AEF
a threat wasn't competent to run Outer Baldonia or one of the smaller Micronesian atolls.)

"Not to harm them. Believe me, kid, they're worth their weight in isotopes to us. We want to work
with them, convince them they're making a mistake to criticize their country. Look, I'm not going to hand
you a line, I'm not going to tell you the Defenders have thrown their whole program out of the window
and the good guys have become bad guys and vice versa. I'm only saying you people never understood
politics; now we want to get you back in on the ground floor."

"A bribe like my fifty thousand dollars and a good job?"

"Bribe? It's how you look at it. We're all AmericansтАФexiles, committee, DefendersтАФand we're on
the spot. No matter what, you wouldn't want to see a bunch of limeys or frogs telling us how to run our
country, would you?"

"They aren't telling us how to run our country. Just not to fight any more wars or put people in
concentration camps."

"Education Centers. Nobody's business but our own. Anyway, I see you wouldn't work with the
English."

"That isn't exactly true. Let's say I couldn't go all the way with them. But don't fool yourself: as
between the Third Force and the Defenders, I pray the Third Force beats you."

"But you don't pray hard enough to do something?"

"Treason is an ugly word, even when you can argue that it isn't treason."

"Look, Mrs. F, you lose me with fancy talk. Let me lay it on the line. All we want you to do is your
duty to your country: give us the names; nobody's going to get mussed up, I swear, and anyway, what
could we do to them? We need them because the war hurt us, even if it hurt the Russians worse, and