"Jerry Pournelle - He Fell into a Dark Hole" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

moments. Rap, can you bring us something to drink?"

Torrin nodded and fussed with drinks from the snakewood cabinet. The
ringing tone of a crystal glass was very loud in the quiet apartment.
Ramsey was vaguely amused as he took a seat at the roseteak table in the
center of the lush room. A rear admiral waiting on a captain, and no
enlisted spacers to serve the Vice Admiral Commanding, who, after all,
wasn't really there in the first placeтАж the whiskey was from Inveraray and
was very good.

"You have been in space nearly two years," Lermontov said. "You have
not seen your father-in-law in that time?"

"More like three since Martin and I really talked about anything,"
Ramsey said. "WeтАФwe remind each other too much of Barbara Jean and
Harold."

The pain in Ramsey's face was reflected as a pale shadow in
Lermontov's eyes. "But you knew he had become chairman of the
appropriations committee."

"Yes."

"The Navy's friend, Grand Senator Grant. Without him these last years
would have been disaster for us all. For the Navy, and for Earth as well if
those politicians could only see it." Lermontov cut himself off with an
angry snap. The big eyes matching his steel gray hair focused on Bart.
"The new appropriations are worse," the admiral growled. "While you
have been away, everything has become worse. Millington, Harmon,
Bertram, they all squeeze President Lipscomb's Unity Party in your
country, and Kaslov gains influence every day in mine. I think it will not be
long before one or the either of the CoDominium sponsors withdraws from
the treaties, Bart. And after that, war."

"War." Ramsey said it slowly, not believing. After a hundred and fifty
years of uneasy peace between the United States and the Soviets, war
again, and with the weapons they hadтАж

"Any spark might set it off," Lermontov was saying. "We must be ready
to step in. The fleet must be strong, strong enough to cope with the
national forces and do whatever we must do."

Ramsey felt as if the admiral had struck him. War? Fleet intervention?
"What about the Commanding Admiral? The Grand Senate?"

Lermontov shrugged. "You know who are the good men, who are not.
But so long as the fleet is strong, something perhaps can be done to save
Earth from the idiocy of the politicians. Not that the masses are better,
screaming for a war they can never understand." Lermontov drank quietly,
obviously searching for words, before he turned back to Ramsey. "I have to