"Tom Purdom-Greenplace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

of the drug. He felt like a pygmy with a wooden harpoon waiting to go out and do battle with one of the
giant creatures that swam in the oceans of Jupiter. Congressman Martin Boyd was probably the most
powerful man in the United States. He had been the undisputed boss of the Eighth Congressional District
since 1952. Now that medical science had conquered death, or had at least given most people an
indefinite life span, his organization might very well control the district forever. In addition to his
forty-eight years seniority, Boyd had accumulated wealth, a first-rate psych staff, and control of the
House Rules Committee and the Sub-Committee on Culture and Recreation. Modern psych techniques
were so powerful, politicians and social scientists unanimously considered Boyd unbeatable.
His head rolled to one side. He scanned the clouds and the blue sky and he estimated the wind
velocity and what kind of weather they were having in Nigeria, where his wife was on a weekend
shopping trip. His hand suddenly appeared between his eyes and the clouds. He tried to return it to the
arm of the chair and instead slapped the bare skin below his shorts hard enough to sting.
He tried to lower his head and look at Greenplace. He found himself looking at the apartment tower
on his right. He noted the number of floors and the number of windows per floor and developed a highly
original theory about the effects of high rise apartment living, combined with current toilet training
procedures, on the Oedipus complex of classic Freudian psychology. Before he could take his eyes off
the tower, his drug-accelerated brain composed a witty paragraph about the theory for his popular
column in Current Psychology.
"Let's... g... g... ooo..." His tongue and lips felt normal but his ears told him his coordination was
already degenerating.
The sec plunged him forward. His head was swaying from side to side. He tried holding it steady and
failed. The landscape swung across his vision.
MST was the most powerful psychic energizer on the market. It multiplied the powers of observation
and the rate and quality of thought by a factor somewhere between three and seven. The user observed
data he would never have observed in his normal condition, and his mind invented and discarded
hypotheses at a dizzying rate. The drug was only eight years old but it had already been responsible for
several breakthroughs in the sciences. Thanks to four brilliant insights by drugged experimenters, his own
field of psycho-therapy had leapfrogged several decades. The black arts of social manipulation had also
advanced.
He heard the wheels of the chair rumble on the street and he calculated how much heat they were
generating and formulated two contradictory hypotheses about what the motion of all the wheeled
vehicles on Earth was doing to the annual temperature and rainfall of the northeastern United States.
Smoothly, without breaking his stride, the sec rolled him off the street onto the sidewalk.
On the first lawn two boys mounted on electric rhinos were engaging in a duel with stunner swords. A
heavy man in dirty shorts and an unbuttoned shirt looked away from the combat and glanced at the
wheelchair and its occupant. His eyes narrowed. His face hardened and he stuck a cigar butt in his
mouth, and then Nicholson's head rolled again and he saw the people watching him from the other side of
the street. Several people had actually gotten out of their lounging chairs and stood up. All the way down
the block, every eye over twelve years old was looking at him.
He had seen the same kind of hostile looks last month when he had surveyed a neighborhood near
here on a weekday morning. Fear of strangers and mind probers seemed to be part of the conditioning
the Boyd organization imposed on the District. A big organization didn't have to psych the voters by
riding around openly drugged. Boyd's psychers could use more subtle methods: surveyors disguised as
salesmen and maintenance men; community carnivals at which the booths and amusements were
concealed psych tests; even, when necessary, arresting people and releasing them with many apologies
and no memory they had been psyched during their detention.
Nicholson's organization consisted of five men and at present he was the only trained psych man in the
group. An MST survey was the only way a small organization could learn enough about the voters to
fight a strong campaign.
Turbine engines whined in his ear. "Cop," the sec grunted.