"Raymond, Hugh - Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Raymond Hugh)

POWER
by Hugh Raymond
(Author of "The Last Viking," "Rebirth of Tomorrow," etc.)
Anna Campbell knew the answer to the chaos that was sweeping the nation. The
problem was: how could it be applied?



THE WINDOW opposite our table in the main dining room of the Hotel Astor misted
slowly. Outside it was beginning to snow. The street noises came distorted
through the solid walls.
I held Anna's hands between my own.
"They're getting noisier," she said, paling a little as a burst of rifle fire
sounded from somewhere near the south end of Times Square.
"Don't worry, darling, please. Nothing can harm us here. At least, until it gets
in. Are you cold?"
She nodded, responding to my smile with one of her own, a stubby chub of a smile
that reminded me of low hills and fleecy clouds. I threw my heavy scarf about
her shoulders, protected only by dainty decolletage. It was difficult, then, to
imagine her working with test tubes and wires and screw drivers and pliers and
collecting dirt on her hands and under her fingernails.
When I first met Anna Campbell she had been flat on her back under an old Ford
truck that had broken down in the hills outside of Bear Mountain. She wielded a
heavy Stillson wrench as though it were a nail buffer. When I offered to help
she declined with thanks--and a smile.
Decolletage became her, more than rough slacks and a heavy shirt, though I loved
her that way. And lipstick judiciously applied was quite as entrancing as a
smear of grease across her cheek. The double brandy she had consumed only a
moment before lit her cheeks like the glow of a spring sunset.
Spring? I laughed. Outside there was cold and turmoil and upheaval. Outside, the
people of New York and everywhere in the United States were showing their
dissatisfaction with a social system that had brought them to the verge of
starvation. I had only to lean forward a few inches to see the swarms being
herded in all directions by desperate mounted police. Things like this were
going on all over the nation. In Chicago. In San Francisco. In tiny villages in
the Sierra Nevadas. In Mexico. And in the vast reaches of Canada. Clearly a
change was in the air. But what? It was the great question of the day, posed by
newspapers and radio commentators who spoke clipped and precise English, and
television actors who gave short and uproarious skits at the expense of a weary
and uninterested government.
The upheaval was reaching into every phase of the country's national life.
Latent political forces long dormant under the force of repression began to
appear. Many and varied were the appeals to this or that platform. Long and
winded were the speeches of this and that demagogue and zealot. Power was in the
process of dissolution in the hands of those who had hitherto controlled it, and
more power was needed to direct it into channels propounded by a dozen political
parties and a thousand ideologies.
I looked at Anna as she nibbled on a cheese cracker. Power! That was the crux of
the matter. Someone--many men--needed inexorable, unconquerable power to impose
their will. And in the brain of the woman sitting opposite me at a small table