"Paul Park - The Tourist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Park Paul)

to
be inoculated right there on the premises with the filthiest syringe
I'd
ever seen. It was a good piece of theatre; one of the officials left to
"wash his hands," and came back in a white smock with blood on it--you
had
to smile. At the same time one of the others was handing out bank
booklets
and explaining how to change money: all tourists were required to
exchange
$50 a week at the State Bank, for which they received a supposedly
equivalent amount of the national currency-three eoliths, a bone
needle,
six arrowheads and two chunks of rock salt. An intrinsic value of about
40
cents, total -this in a country where in any case dollars and
Deutschmarks
are the only money that anyone accepts.

Paul and I lined up to buy our currency packs, which came in a
convenient
leather pouch. "It's ridiculous," he said. "Before time travel they
didn't
even have domesticated animals. They lived in caves. What were they
going
to buy?"
He had been working in the country for about five years, and was
knowledgeable about it. At first I liked him because he still seemed
fresh
in some ways, his moral outrage tempered with humour and a grudging
admiration for Dr Mog. "He's not a fool," he said. "His PhD is a real
one:
political economy from the University of Colombo--the correspondence
branch, of course, but his dissertation was published. An amazing
accomplishment when you consider his background. And he's just about
the
only one of these dictators who's not a foreign puppet or an
adventurer--he's a genuine Cro-Magnon, native to the area, and he's
managed to stay in power despite some horrendous CIA intrigues, and get
very rich in the process."
Someone wheeled in a trolley with our luggage on it. The customs men
spread out the suitcases on a long table. Paul and I were done early;
we
both had packed light, and were carrying no modern gadgets. The others,
most of whom were with a tour group going to Altamira, stood around in
abject silence while the officials went through everything, arbitrarily
confiscating cameras, hairdryers, CD players on a variety of pretexts.
"This is a waste of our electrical resources," admonished one, holding
up
a Norelco.