"Niven, Larry - Rammer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

"So they can look up at their betters while they work? That's no way to learn. It would take ... I get the feeling we re talking about decades of this kind of thing."

"Thirty years' labor generally earns a man his citizenship. That gets him a right to work-which then gets him a guaranteed base income he can use to buy education tapes and shots. And the medical benefits are impressive. We live longer than you used to, Corbett."

"Meanwhile it's slave labor. Anyway, none of this applies to me-"

"No, of course not. Corbett, you're wrong to call it slave labor. A slave can't quit. You can change jobs any time you like. There's a clear freedom of choice."

Corbett shivered. "Any slave can commit suicide."

"Suicide, my ass," the checker said distinctly. If he had anything that could he called an accent it lay in the precision of his pronunciation. "Jerome Corbett is dead. I could have given you his intact skeleton for a souvenir."

"I don't doubt it." Corbett saw himself tenderly polishing his own white bones. But where could he have kept such a thing?

"Well, then. You're a brain-wiped criminal, justly brain-wiped, I might add. Your crime has cost you your citizenship, but you still have the right to change professions. You need only ask for another personality. What slave can change jobs at will?"

"It would feel like dying."

"Nonsense. You go to sleep, that's all. When you wake up you've got a different set of memories.

The subject was an unpleasant one. Corbett avoided it from then on. But he could not avoid talking to the checker. Pierce was the only man in the world he could talk to. On the days Pierce failed to show up he felt angry, frustrated.

Once he asked about gravitational point sources. "My time didn't know about those."

"Yes, it did. Neutron stars. You had a number of pulsars located by nineteen seventy, and the math to describe how a pulsar decays. The thing to watch for is a decayed pulsar directly in your path."

"Oh.''

Pierce regarded him in some amusement. "You really don't know much about your own time, do you?"

"Astrophysics wasn't my field. And we didn't have your learning techniques." Which reminded him of something. "Pierce, you said you learned English with RNA injections. Where did the RNA come from?"

Pierce grinned and left.

Corbett did not want to die. He was utterly, disgustingly healthy and twenty years younger than he had been at death. He found his rammer education continually fascinating. If only they would stop treating him like property ....

Corbett had been in the army, but that had been twenty years before his death. He had learned to take orders, but never to like it. What had galled him then had been the basic assumption of his inferiority. But no army officer in Corbett's experience had believed in Corbett's inferiority as completely as did Pierce and Pierce's guards.

The checker never repeated a command, never seemed even to consider that Corbett would refuse. If Corbett refused, once, he knew what would happen. And Pierce knew that he knew. No army could have survived in such a state. The attitude better fitted a death camp.

They must think I'm a zombie....

Corbett carefully did not pursue the thought. He was a corpse brought back to life-but not all the way.

The life was not pleasant. His last-class citizenship was galling. There was nobody to talk to-nobody but Pierce, whom he was learning to hate. He was hungry most of the time. The single daily meal barely filled his belly and it would not stay full. No wonder he had wakened so lean.

More and more he lived in the teaching chair. Vicariously he became a rammer then and the impotence of his life was changed to omnipotence. Starman! Riding the fire that feeds the suns, scooping fuel from interstellar space itself, spreading electromagnetic fields like wings hundreds of miles out ...

Two weeks after the State had wakened him from the dead, Corbett was given his course.