"Daniel Keys Moran - A Tale of the Continuing Time 02 - The Long Run" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moran Daniel Keys)

"Monsieur," protested the manager in such horribly accented English
that Trent could barely follow her, "I do not think we can."
"It's okay," said Trent, standing, "we're done." To Jerry Jackson he said,
"I've really got to go; I'm late for another appointment." He turned back
once before leaving. "Next time," he said as Jerry Jackson stared, "you
have to take me someplace classier."


2-
Once there was a thief, and the thief was God. тАФThe first line in The
Exodus Bible.
It was a twenty-minute slidewalk trip from L'Express, at one end of the
old Brooklyn Navy Yard, through streets lined by gray plastisteel
residential high rises, to the Down Plaza at the other end of the
development. Trent ran all the way. He was delayed just before he reached
the Plaza when a bomb in a baby carriage blew up next to a pair of
patrolling Peaceforcers, killing the Peaceforcers and several of the
bystanders and tearing a hole in the slidewalk that brought the slidewalk
to a shuddering, grinding stop. Despite his hurry Trent stopped running
immediately, and walked without haste through the growing rain, away
from the crowd that was gathering around the site of the explosion,
walked straight as a laser the rest of the way to the Plaza maglev.
There were about twenty fashionable, damp, well-dressed people
crowded onto the air-conditioned maglev platform as it descended
beneath street level.
Trent was not particularly noticeable; because it was necessary for the
job, so that he would not stand out from the other patrons inside
CalleyTronics, Trent had dressed that day every bit as well as the children
of the wealthy and privileged who swarmed through the eight huge,
underground levels of the Down Plaza, the busiest shopping structure in
all of the Patrol Sectors.
Most of those crowded onto the maglev platform, as it sank into the
Down Plaza, were slender; a few of the less well-dressed were gaunt.
Two of them were fat. Somewhere in their mid-thirties, Trent guessed;
they were French and they were female and they were very fat. Not
counting the cyborg French Peace-forcers Elite, who came by their mass
in honest metal and metal-ceramics, Trent had in his entire life never seen
more gross tonnage on two bodies. Between the two of them they must
have massed 250 kilos.
They were the last ones onto the maglev platform, already half loaded
down with their packages and bags and umbrellas, chattering gaily hi
French so perfectly accented that there was no question in Trent's mind as
to their nationality. They could not be employed themselves, not by the
U.N.; the U.N. had maximum weight standards. Wives, then, of United
Nations officials transplanted from France to oversee in the governing of
Occupied America.
Most United Nations officials were French, and most Peaceforcers as
well; by the pure luck of the draw France had, almost alone among
technological nations, come through the Unification War unscathed. In
the rebuilding which took place following the Unification, the French had