"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Oath of Fealty" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"Yes, sir. I thought there might be paper work, my first day and all."
The sergeant smiled faintly. "Computers take care of that. Dunhill?" He frowned. "Oh, yeah, you're the new man from Seattle PD. Guess you had a pretty good record up there. Want some coffee?" He turned to a machine on one side of the room.
"Uh, guess so. Light and sweet, please."
The sergeant pushed buttons. The machine thought for a moment, then whined faintly. The sergeant held out a molded plastic mug. "Here you go."
Joe tasted experimentally. "Hey. That's good." The surprise was obvious in his voice.
"Well of course it's-Oh. You're new here. Look, all the coffee machines in Todos Santos make good coffee. We wouldn't have 'em here if they didn't. Boss lady bought a thousand of these."
Even clichщs die, Joe Dunhill thought.
"Why'd you leave Seattle?"
The question sounded casual, and maybe, Joe thought, maybe it is. And maybe not. "Todos Santos made me an offer I couldn't refuse."
The sergeant's smile was friendly, but knowing. "Dunhill, I wasn't on the board that decided to hire you, but I've heard the story. I think you got a raw deal."
"Thanks."
"Yeah. But I wouldn't have hired you if it was left up to me."
"Oh." Joe didn't know what to say to that.
"Not because you shot that punk. I'd have done the same thing myself."
"Then why not?"
"Because I don't think you can do the job."
"I was a damned good policeman," Joe said.
"I know you were. And probably still are. And that's the trouble. We don't have police here." The sergeant laughed at Joe's blank stare. "We look like police, right? Badges. Uniforms. Guns, some of us. But we aren't police, Dunhill. We're security people, and there's a lot of difference." He came over to put his hand on Joe's shoulder. "Look, I hope you work out. Let's go."
He led Joe out of the reception room and down a long hail to a closed door.
"Did they tell you about the locking system we use here?" the sergeant asked.
"Not really."
"Well, everybody in Todos Santos has an ID badge. There's some kind of electronic magic-well, hell, it might as well be magic for all I know! It opens locks if you've got the right badge for it. Residents' badges open their own doors, that kind of thing.
Security badges open a lot of doors." He waved his own badge at the door in front of them. Nothing happened. "But not this one. Security Central's kind of special. What happeils is we alert the inside duty officer."
They waited for a few moments, then the door opened into a small, dimly lit room the size of a closet. The door behind them closed, then another door in front of them opened onto a much larger and even more dimly lit room.
There were TV screens around all four walls, banks of them, with uniformed men seated in front of each bank. In the center of the room was a huge circular console with dozens of dials and buttons. More TV screens were built into the console. A uniformed captain wearing a tiny telephone headset-microphone sprawled in a comfortable chair in the middle of the center console.
"Dunhill, Captain," the sergeant said. "First day. Assigned to Blake."
The captain nodded. "Thanks, Adler. Welcome aboard, Dunhill."


Isaac Blake had a square face with roundness shaping under the square chin, a square body also turning round, black-andwhite hair with the white winning. He lolled at ease before the bank of TV screens and sipped coffee. Every twenty seconds or so he touched a knob and the pictures shifted.
There seemed no order to the flow of pictures. Now the camera looked down on the heads of hundreds of shoppers strolling along a Mall, bright-colored clothing that looked strange because the light was artificial but the scene was so large that you expected it to be sunlight. Now a view of a big dining hail. Now a view through the orange groves, looking up at Todos Santos standing a thousand feet tall.
"Whew-this is one big city. Even on a TV screen."
Blake nodded. "Yeah, it still gets to me, sometimes." His fingers moved, and the view shifted to look along one side wall. Seen from that angle, the two-mile length seemed to stretch on forever.
The kaleidoscope continued. Sparse traffic in a subway. Interior halls, stretching far away; people on moving belts, people on es
calators, people in elevators. A dizzying view down onto a balcony, where a nude hairy man sprawled in obscene comfort on an air mattress. Thirty men and women seated at a long bench soldering tiny electronic parts onto circuit boards, chatting gaily and working almost without looking at what they were doing.
The camera switched to the greensward beyond Todos Santos's perimeter, where a dozen pickets lethargically marched about with signs. "END THE NEST BEFORE IT ENDS HUMAN1TY," said one. Blake sniffed and touched buttons. The scene jumped to a pretty girl in a miniskirt carrying a bag of groceries; the camera followed her down a long hall from an escalator, zooming along to keep her in closeup as she walked into a small alcove. When she took her badge out of her purse, the door opened, and she went inside, leaving the door standing open while she set the bag down on an Eames chair. For a moment the screen showed an expensive apartment, meticulously clean, thick rugs, paintings on the walls. The girl was unbuttoning her blouse as she came to the door and closed it.
"Like to watch the rest of that show," Blake muttered. He turned a lazy smile toward Joe Dunhill.
"Of course we aren't supposed to do that," Dunhill said.
"Nope. Can't, either."
"Oh. I've noticed you haven't shown up the inside of any apartment. I guess I wouldn't want cameras in my bathroom either."
"Oh, we've got them there," Blake said. "But they don't go on without authorization-there's one now." He touched his headset. "Captain, I'll take that interior call."
"Right."
The TV screen ificked to show a kitchen. A small boy was pulling things out of cabinets, scattering flour on the floor and carefully mixing in salt preparatory to pouring a bottle of sherry across the mess. Blake reached forward to a button under the screen. He waited a moment, then said into the tiny headset microphone, "Ma'am, this is Central Security. Somebody pushed the panic button in the kitchen, and I think you'd better have a look out there. Yes, Ma'am, it's safe but you ought to hurry."
He waited. On the screen above, a woman, mid-thirties, not very attractive at the moment because her hair was partly in curlers and partly in wet strings, came into the kitchen, looked down in horror, and shouted, "Peter!"
Then she looked up with a smile and moved closer to the camera. "Thank you, Officer," she said. Blake smiled back, for no sane reason, and touched a dial. The picture faded.


Joe Dunhill watched in concentration. Sergeant Adler had been right, this was no kind of police work he'd ever seen. He turned to Blake. "I don't get it. You just skip around."
"Sort of. Of course there are exceptions, like when somebody asks us to keep an eye on things. But mostly we watch what we feel like. After a while you get some judgment about the feels."
"But wouldn't it be better to have assigned places? Instead of jumping around-"