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

Street: I had my luggage sent on there from the airport and came out on the Long Island subway."

"Fine. I have a room at Midtown City, myself, though I sleep here about half the time." He nodded
toward a door on the left. "Suppose we go in and have dinner together. This cafeteria, here, is a horrible
place. It's run by a dietitian instead of a chef, and everything's so white-enamel antiseptic that I swear I
smell belladonna-icthyol ointment every time I go in the place. Wait here till I change clothes."




At the Long Island plant, no one was concerned about espionageтАФneither the processes nor the
equipment used there were secretтАФbut the countersabotage security was fantastically thorough. Every
person or scrap of material entering the reactor area was searched; the life-history of every man and
woman employed there was known back to the cradle. A broad highway encircled it outside the fence,
patrolled night and day by twenty General Stuart cavalry-tanks. There were a thousand soldiers, and
three hundred Atomic Power Authority police, and only God knew how many F.B.I, and Central
Intelligence undercover agents. Every supervisor and inspector and salaried technician was an armed
United States deputy marshal. And nobody, outside the Department of Defense, knew how much radar
and counter-rocket and fighter protection the place had, but the air-defense zone extended from Boston
to Philadelphia and as far inland as Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.

The Long Island Nuclear Power Plant, Melroy thought, had all the invulnerability of AchillesтАФand no
more.

The six new Doernberg-Giardano breeder-reactors clustered in a circle inside a windowless concrete
building at the center of the plant. Beside their primary purpose of plutonium production, they furnished
heat for the sea-water distillation and chemical extraction system, processing the water that was run
through the steam boilers at the main power reactors, condensed, redistilled, and finally pumped, pure,
into the water mains of New York. Safe outside the shielding, in a corner of a high-ceilinged room, was
the plyboard-screened on-the-job office of the Melroy Engineering Corporation's timekeepers and
foremen. Beyond, along the far wall, were the washroom and locker room and lunch room of the
workmen.

Sixty or seventy men, mostly in white coveralls and all wearing identification badges and carrying
dosimeters in their breast pockets and midget Geigers strapped to their wrists, were crowded about the
bulletin-board in front of the makeshift office. There was a hum of voicesтАФsome perplexed or angry, but
mostly good-humored and bantering. As Melroy and Doris Rives approached, the talking died out and
the men turned. In the sudden silence, one voice, harshly strident, continued:

"... do they think this is, anyhow? We don't hafta take none of that."

Somebody must have nudged the speaker, trying without success to hush him. The bellicose voice
continued, and Melroy spotted the speakerтАФshort, thick-set, his arms jutting out at an angle from his
body, his heavy features soured with anger.

"Like we was a lotta halfwits, 'r nuts, 'r some'n! Well, we don't hafta stand for this. They ain't got no
rightтАФ"

Doris Rives clung tighter to Melroy's arm as he pushed a way for himself and her through the crowd and
into the temporary office. Inside, they were met by a young man with a deputy marshal's badge on his