"H. Beam Piper - Day of the Moron" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

pretty ripe by that time, must have been shoved in too close to it and to one another. You know how fast
those D-G's work. It just took this long to build up CM for a bomb-type reaction. You remember what I
was saying before the lights went out? Well, it happened. Some moronтАФsome untested and undetected
moronтАФmade the wrong kind of a mistake."

"Too bad about Crandall. He was a good kid, only he didn't stop to think often enough," Cronnin said.
"Well, I guess the strike's off, now; that's one thing."

"But all those people, out there!" Womanlike, Doris Rives was thinking particularly rather than generally
and of humans rather than abstractions. "It must have killed everybody for miles around."

Sid Keating, Melroy thought. And Joe Ricci, and Ben Puryear, and Steve Chalmers, and all the
workmen whom he had brought here from Pittsburgh, to their death. Then he stopped thinking about
them. It didn't do any good to think of men who'd been killed; he'd learned that years ago, as a kid
second lieutenant in Korea. The people to think about were the millions in Greater New York, and up
the Hudson Valley to Albany, and as far south as Trenton, caught without light in the darkness, without
heat in the dead of winter, without power in subways and skyscrapers and on railroads and interurban
lines.

He turned to the woman beside him.

"Doris, before you could get your Board of Psychiatry and Neurology diploma, you had to qualify as a
regular M.D., didn't you?" he asked.

"Why, yesтАФ"

"Then you'd better report to the nearest hospital. Any doctor at all is going to be desperately needed, for
the next day or so. Me, I still have a reserve major's commission in the Army Corps of Engineers.
They're probably calling up reserve officers, with any radios that are still working. Until I hear differently,
I'm ordering myself on active duty as of now." He looked around. "Anybody know where the nearest
Army headquarters is?"

"There's a recruiting station down on the thirty-something floor," Quillen said. "It's probably closed, now,
though."

"Ground Defense Command; Midtown City," Leighton said. "They have a medical section of their own;
they'll be glad to get Dr. Rives, too."

Melroy helped her on with her coat and handed her her handbag, then shrugged into his own overcoat
and belted it about him, the weight of the flashlight and the automatic sagging the pockets. He'd need
both, the gun as much as the lightтАФNew York had more than its share of vicious criminals, to whom this
power-failure would be a perfect devilsend. Handing Doris the light, he let her take his left arm. Together,
they left the room and went down the hallway to the stairs and the long walk to the darkened street
below, into a city that had suddenly been cut off from its very life-energy. A city that had put all its eggs in
one basket, and left the basket in the path of any blundering foot.

THE END