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

I tried tact. "Shall we see if we can conscript a fourth?"

"It's not like that," Phoebe said. "Anton and I, we're together. We had to tell you."

But I'd never thought... I'd never claimed Phoebe. Dreams are private. This was coming from some wild direction. "Together as in?"

Anton said, "Well, not married, not yet, but thinking about it. And we wanted to talk privately."

"Like over dinner?"

"A good suggestion."

"I like Buffalo Bill. Let's go there."

Twenty-odd habituщs of the Monobloc must have heard the exchange and watched us leave. Those three long-timers seem friendly enough but too serious... and three's an odd number...

We didn't talk until we'd reached Apt 23309.

Anton closed the door before he spoke. "She's in, Jack. Everything."

I said, "It's really love, then."

Phoebe smiled. "Jack, don't be offended. Choosing is what humans do."

Trite, I thought, and then: Skip it. "That bit there in the Monobloc seemed overdone. I felt excessively foolish."

"That was for them. My idea," Phoebe said. "After tonight one of us may have to go away. This way we've got an all-purpose excuse. You leave because your best friend and favored lady closed you out. Or Phoebe leaves because she can't bear to ruin a friendship. Or big, burly Jack drives Anton away. See?"

She wasn't just in; she was taking over. Ah, well. "Phoebe, love, do you believe in murderous cats eight feet tall?"

"Do you have doubts, Jack?"

"Not anymore. I called my son. Something secretive is happening in Aristarchus, something that requires a medic."

She only nodded. "What have you got for us?"

I showed them my dime disk. "Took me less than a week. Run it in an autodoc. Ten personality choices. The chemical differences aren't big, but... infantry, which means killing on foot and doesn't have anything to do with children... where was I? Yah. Infantry isn't at all like logistics, and neither is like espionage, and navy is different yet. We may have lost some of the military vocations over the centuries. We'll have to reinvent them. This is just a first cut. I wish we had a way to try it out."

Anton set a dime disk next to mine, along with a small projector. "Mine's nearly full. The ARM's stored an incredible range of dangerous devices. We need to think hard about where to store this. I even wondered if one of us should be emigrating, which is why - "

"To the Belt? Farther?"

"Jack, if this all adds up, we won't have time to reach another star."

We watched stills and flat motion pictures of weapons and tools in action. Much of it was quite primitive, copied out of deep archives. We watched rock and landscape being torn, aircraft exploding, machines destroying other machines... and imagined flesh shredding.

"I could get more, but I thought I'd better show you this first," Anton said.

I said, "Don't bother."