"Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

I said, "I wish-" and she stopped me.
"I know what you wish. Maybe I do, too, but we can't."
"There's nobody around this part of the pool
"Oh, Nicky, you know that's not it. What if I, you know, got, well, caught?"
"That's not very likely." No response to that. "Anyway, there are things that can be done."
"No, they can't, Nicky dear. Not if you mean the 'A' word. I could never destroy my child's life. Anyway, those places aren't easy to find, and then who knows if they'll kill you or spoil you for life?"
The trouble was that she was right and we both knew it. There wasn't a day that went by without some police raid on a back-door abortionist, with the criminal dragged away by the police and all the patients trying to hide their faces from the news cameras. We certainly didn't want that.
There was hardly anyone left in the pool now. No one seemed to notice that we weren't swimming. Greta eased back closer to me, did not resist when I kissed her again.
"Nicky?" she whispered in my ear.
"What, honey?"
Faint giggle, then a whisper so low I could hardly hear the words: "What about going topless now?"
I looked around. Apart from a couple of elderly men in bathing suits and robes, finishing out a checker game, the only person left in the pool area was the lifeguard. He was reading a newspaper under the exit light.
"Why not?" I said.
And I reached down between us and slowly, slowly unzipped the top part of my bathing suit.

Now, you have to remember that going topless is not really some big crime. In the city code it's called a Class 3 misdemeanor- that means they never arrest you for it, just give you a ticket, as for parking in the wrong place. The fine is never more than five or ten dollars and the judges hardly ever give ajail sentence. Often when a man goes topless they'll let him off with just a warning, if it's a first offense.
So I did not expect what happened.
I did not expect that all the pool lights would come on at once. The checker players yawped in surprise as someone came running right through them, sending the board flying. That was only one someone, and there were others coming from all directions- through the men's dressing room, through the ladies', even over the fence; and they all converged on me. Two large men jumped right in the pool, clothes and all, to grab me and drag me out.
Greta stood staring; chin-deep in the water-terrified and bewildered, and no more so than I.
The world whirled, and didn't stop whirling until they had me bent over the hood of a car, just outside the pool fence. The metal was hot; the car had just got here, and it felt as though it had been driven hard. They made me spread my feet wide apart, while a nastily unfriendly cop's hand ran over the wet seat of my bathing suit-searching for weapons, for God's sake? There were two other cars, headlights on and pointed straight at me, at least half a dozen men-and they were pointed straight at me too; I was the center of it all.
And the only thing I could think of to say was, "Listen! All I did was take my damn top off!"
The queerness that developed-the questions that were unanswered!
Why should the residents of Los Angeles suddenly complain that their sweet, orange-scented air was being invaded by gusts of poison gas?
What made twenty thousand peaceable subjects of the czar suddenly march through downtown Kiev chanting revolutionary slogans?
Why were so many persons being admitted to mental institutions with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, characterized by a terrified conviction that they ivere being watched by unseen eyes?
Why were things suddenly so strange?
17 August 1983
1:18 A.M. Nicky DeSota
I've taken the Daley Expressway down into the city a thousand times. Never like this before. Never with sirens going and overhead lights flashing off the hood ornament of the big Cadillac. At that hour of the morning there were not that many other cars on the road, but the ones that were scooted out of our way as soon as they saw the flashers of the Chicago Police Department cruiser that ran interference for us. We made it in twenty-one minutes. Faster than the train; but it was the longest twenty-one minutes of my life.
No one would tell me a thing. "What are you pulling me in for?" "Shut up, Dominic." "What did I do?" "You'll find out." "Can't you tell me anything?" "Listen, son, for the last time, shut up. Chief Agent Christophe will tell you all you want to know-a lot more, even!"
"Son" he called me. That was the gorilla on my right-dripping wet from coming into the pool after me, at least two years younger than I. But there was a big difference between us. I was the prisoner, and he was the one who knew the answers he wouldn't tell.
There wasn't any sign on the office building on Wabash, but the night watchman let us in at once. There was no name on the door of the suite on the twentieth floor. There was no one in the anteroom of the suite. No one would tell me anything still; but at least one question got answered. I saw the portrait on the wall over the receptionist's desk. I recognized that hallowed old face at once- anybody would-stern as a snapping turtle, determined as an avalanche.
J. Edgar Hoover.
The phone message hadn't been that garbled after all. I was in the hands of the FBI.
I don't know if you truly see all your life flashing before you when you're drowning. I do know that over the next few minutes I reviewed every punishable thing I'd ever done. Not just going topless or nearly demolishing a Chicago traffic cop. I went way back. I started with the time I peed against the back wall of Olivet Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, when I was nine years old and caught short on my way to Sunday School. I covered cheating on my college entrance examination, and the false claim I'd filed for fire losses when my dormitory burned-the bed and innerspring mattress I'd claimed hadn't really belonged to me at all, but to my buddy in Alpha Kappa Nu. I even remembered what I had censored clear out of my waking consciousness, the one time I'd really got close to serious trouble with the Arabs. It wasn't a prideful memory. My high-school buddy Tim Karasueritis and I had put away three bottles of illegal beer, practicing to be macho. It wasn't bad enough that I threw up. What made it really bad was that I did it right on the corner of Randolph and Wacker, in front of the biggest, richest mosque in all Chicagoland. And when I had poured it all out on the sidewalk Tim took his turn. While I was holding his head over the curb, I looked up. There was a hajji, white beard and green turban, looking at us with furious and accusing eyes. Bad scene! I thought we'd had it for sure, but I guess even Arab ha,jjis have teenaged kids. He didn't say a word. He just stared at us for a long, long moment, then turned and went into the mosque. Maybe he came out again with the Arab equivalent of the cops, but before then we were long gone, running when we could manage it and somehow staggering away anyway when we couldn't.
Oh, I plumbed my depths. I searched every indictable or reprehensible or merely obnoxious memory I had, without finding one that would justify the FBI coming after me in the middle of the night.
After ten minutes, I got brave enough to decide to tell somebody this fact. There wasn't anybody to tell. They had sat me down in a small room with little furniture. Bear in mind that all I was wearing was a bathing suit. It had long since dried out, sure, but they had the windows open somewhere in the offices, and cold Lake Michigan breezes were coming in under the door-the, as I discovered when my courage reached the point of trying it, locked door.
Funnily, even though I wore so little, they had insisted on searching me. They were taking no chance that I might be carrying a weapon, I supposed-either to attack one of them, or (maybe in a fit of contrition at the enormity of my crimes, whatever those crimes might turn out to be) to kill myself and spoil their plans for me.
Unfortunately I couldn't think of anything in my past worth killing for. It was embarrassing not to know what I was arrested for, but I couldn't do anything about that. I couldn't do anything much at all. Not only was the door locked, but there was very little in this tiny room to do anything with. There was a loudspeaker up high, behind a grille, that was playing music-violins, mostly; longhair stuff. There was a desk. It was absolutely bare on top, and what it might have inside its drawers I could not know. When I got up the nerve to just accidentally happen to tug at one of them it was as locked as the door. There was an upholstered swivel chair behind the desk, and a straight-backed wooden one before it. No one was present to tell me which one I might sit in, but I took the wooden one anyway.
I sat, my arms wrapped around me against the cold, and thought.
And then, without warning, the door opened, and Chief Agent Christophe came in.
Chief Agent Christophe was a woman.

Chief Agent Nyla Christophe was not the only one who came through the door, but there was no doubt who was who. She was the boss. The others with her, two men and a plump, middle-aged woman, demonstrated that fact by body language.
It took me a while to get over my surprise. Of course, everybody knew that the FBI had begun recruiting woman agents a while earlier. No one would expect to see one. They were like woman taxi drivers or woman doctors; you knew they existed because when one did show up anywhere it got onto the newsreels and you saw it the next time you went to the movies. That wouldn't happen with FBI agents, of course. No personality story about an FBI agent was ever going to turn up as a human-interest brightener in the weekly newsreel. Any cameraman who tried to do one would be in the soup- charged, probably, with something like reckless endangerment, for exposing a government operative to possible criminal retribution. Then he would turn up in an interrogation room in fear of his life. . .
Very much like me.
Anyway, in she came. First there was a big guy to open the door for her, then Chief Agent Chnstophe, then die fat lady, then another big guy to close it. She glanced at me as she came in, abstractedly: Oh, yes, there's the piece of furniture that belongs in this room. I looked back at her, with, I am sure, a lot more concentration. Nyla Chnstophe was a good-looking woman of a certain type. The type was big-boned and athletic. She had her hair tied behind in a ponytail, and pale blue eyes. She kept her hands folded behind her as she walked, in the style of a British admiral from the age of sail. She gave commands like an admiral. To the two huskies: "Tie him." To the plump lady who panted to the desk and pulled out a shorthand pad: "Write: August seventeenth, 1983, Chief Agent N. Christophe conducting interview of Dominic DeSota." To me:
"Make it easy on yourself, DeSota.Just give us the truth, answer all the questions, and we'll be through here in twenty minutes. First take the oath."
That wasn't good. To be put on oath right away meant that they were pretty serious. What I was going to tell them wasn't just going to be information received in an investigation. It was going to be evidence. The woman-stenographer stood up and held out the books to me, wheezing the words for me to repeat after her. I stretched my hand from Bible to Koran, little finger on one, thumb touching the binding of the other, and swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God the Merciful, the All-Seeing, and the Avenging. "Fine, Dominic," said Chnstophe as the huskies retied my right hand. She glanced at her watch as though she really thought we might get out of there in twenty minutes. "Now,just tell me why you were trying to break into Daleylab."
I goggled. "Do what?"