"Niven, Larry - Madness Has Its Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Twitchy. Anton looked twitchy. I was amused. "Still with the Holy Office?"

"Only citizens call it that, Jack."

"I'm a citizen now. Still gives me a kick. How's your chemistry?"

Anton knew what I meant and didn't pretend otherwise. "I'm okay. I'm down."

"Kid, you're looking over both shoulders at once."

Anton managed a credible laugh. "I'm not the kid anymore. I'm a weekly."

The ARM had made me a weekly at forty-eight. They couldn't turn me loose at the end of the day anymore because my body chemistry couldn't shift fast enough. So they kept me in the ARM building Monday through Thursday and gave me all of Thursday afternoon to shed the schitz madness. Another twenty years of that and I was even less flexible, so they retired me.

I said, "You do have to remember. When you're in the ARM building, you're a paranoid schizophrenic. You have to be able to file that when you're outside."

"Hah. How can anyone - "

"You get used to the schitz. After I quit, the difference was amazing. No fears, no tension, no ambition."

"No Charlotte?"

"Well... I turned boring. And what are you doing here?"

Anton looked around. "Much the same thing you are, I guess. lack, am I the youngest one here?"

"Maybe." I looked around, double-checking. A woman was distracting me, though I could see only her back and a flash - of a laughing profile. Her back was slender and strong, and a thick white braid ran down her spine, two and a half feet of clean, thick white hair. She was in an animated conversation with a blond companion of Anton's age plus a few. But they were at a table for two: they weren't inviting company. I forced my attention back. "We're gray singles, Anton. The young ones tend to get the message quick. We're slower than we used to be. We date. You want to order?"

Alcohol wasn't popular there. Anton must have noticed, but he ordered guava juice and vodka and drank as if he needed it. This looked worse than Thursday jitters. I let him half finish, then said, "Assuming you can tell me - "

"I don't know anything."

"I know the feeling. What should you know?"

The tension eased behind Anton's eyes. "There was a message from the Angel's Pencil."

"Pencil... oh." My mental reflexes had slowed down. The Angel's Pencil had departed twenty years earlier for... was it Epsilon Eridani? "Come on, kid, it'll be in the boob cubes before you have quite finished speaking. Anything from deep space is public property."

"Hah! No. It's restricted. I haven't seen it myself. Only a reference, and it must be more than ten years old."

That was peculiar. And if the Belt stations hadn't spread the news through the solar system, that was peculiar. No wonder Anton was antsy. ARMs react that way to puzzles.

Anton seemed to jerk himself back to the here and now, back to the gray singles regime. "Am I cramping your style?"

"No problem. Nobody hurries in the Monobloc. If you see someone you like -" My fingers danced over lighted symbols on the rim of the table. "This gets you a map. Locate where she's sitting, put the cursor on it. That gets you a display... hmm."

I'd set the cursor on the white-haired lady. I liked the readout. "Phoebe Garrison, seventy-nine, eleven or twelve years older than you. Straight. Won a second in the Gray Jumps last year... that's the Americas skiing matches for seventy and over. She could kick your tail if you don't watch your manners. It says she's smarter than we are, too.

"Point is, she can check you out the same way. Or me. And she probably found this place through the Velvet Net, which is the computer network for unlocked lifestvles."