"John Morressy - Rimrunners Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

a way that scares people. Take yourself, for example: born in a time of social
unrest, your father a decorated hero in a war that many Americans condemned.
Orphaned at seven and bounced around a dozen foster homes. Because of your work,
you've become a man without roots. Except for a score of rimrunners, everyone
else born in your time is dead."

"All true. But so what?"

"You're the living embodiment of two things the people of this time fear:
violence and alienation. All our social analysts consider them the besetting
sicknesses of the twentieth century and warn us that we've survived only because
we've overcome them."

"You haven't overcome them. You've just learned to cover them over."

"It may look that way to you, but violence is rare these days, and alienation
afflicts only a small number. Yet the rimrunners -- people we need, people we
trust to be our first line of planetary defense -- are living examples of these
very ills."

"Why don't you just put us in quarantine? Send us up, but don't let us land."

"That's been suggested."

"This is the first I've heard. Spell it out for me."

"This is confidential, Captain. Understood? Absolutely confidential."

"Understood."

"Three years ago, a special commission recommended that rimrunner operations be
moved to Luna IV and consolidated with the Solomon and Paladin complexes. A
settlement was to be built especially for rimrunner personnel --"

"The ungrateful gutless bastards," Vanderhorst said, rising.

"The recommendation was soundly rejected. It's never come up again. I mention it
only as a sign of the fears in some minds."
"Some minds. Descendants of the sons of bitches who spat at my father when he
came back from a war they dodged." Vanderhorst sank back into his chair. He
stared blankly ahead, his breathing audible in the silence. "I think you'd be
smart to leave now," he said at last.

"I fought the recommendation, and helped defeat it. I'll fight it again, i(it
comes up."

Without moving, Vanderhorst said, "When I lock in from my next circuit, it will
be 2107. You'll be in your eighties. Maybe you'll be dead. Which way will the
vote go then?"