"E. E. Doc Smith - D'Alembert 10 - Revolt of the Galaxy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

Pias had brought plenty of money with him, and spent a week living in Garridan, growing more and
more alarmed by what he saw. The citizen's card was a necessity on Newforest; not only did the
police have the right to stop anyone at random on the street and ask to see the card, but it was
impossible to buy anything with out presenting the card at the time of purchase. From renting a
hotel room to eating meals to buying basic toiletries, there was virtually no aspect of life that
was not controlled or regulated by that simple blue card.
More alarming than that, though, was the attitude of the people. Newforest had always been a
lighthearted world, and the inhabitants of Garridan had been noted for their easy informal ways.
Now there was a pall of fear over the town. People were particularly careful about what they said
and to whom they said it, and in variably looked over their shoulders before speaking to make sure
no police were in the area. People spoke in whispers in dark corners; Pias, as a stranger in town,
was excluded from most conversations, though there had been a time when even strangers shared in
the activities of Garridan. Nowadays, no one could afford to trust someone he didn't know.
Out of curiosity, Pias took a walk by the local office of the Service of the Empire. Because
Newforest was an out-of-the-way planet where little ever happened, the SOTE office was barely more
than a storefront staffed by a couple of low-level officials. Pias considered going in, but
thought better of it when he saw the trio of police officers loitering nearby. They were watching
the office and obviously prepared to take note of anyone trying to contact SOTE with complaints
about the local regime. Pias had little doubt that calls to SOTE were also monitored, further
discouraging local complaints. Still, such activities should not have silenced the SOTE operatives
themselves; anyone with eyes could see what a reprehensible situation was occurring here. SOTE's
failure to do anything indicated a tremendous breakdown somewhere in the system.
Pias spent a week in Garridan, becoming more and more depressed at the dismal circumstances. He
wandered, watched, listened, and spent a good deal of time mentally composing the blistering
report he would write to the Head. But the report was still incomplete; there were still things he
had to discover about Tas and the way the system operated.
The key to everything on Newforest seemed to be those little blue citizen's cards. Through their
use, a person could be tracked throughout the city and his movements monitored to a high degree of
precision. Pias's own trail had been innocent and random; the security forces would learn nothing
by keeping track of where he went and what he did. But there was serious potential for abuse; with
a system this tight, individual freedom became purely a rhetorical concept.
To make the system work would require an enormous degree of computer sophistication, a reliance on
technology that Pias would have thought antithetical to the Newforest character. Somewhere there
had to be a computer facility where this random information, compiled from all over the world, was
assimilated and analyzed to look for troublemakers or signs of rebellion. There had been no major
computer centers on Newforest when Pias had left it. Somehow, Tas had built one in the last few
years to consolidate his tyrannical rule. Such a facility would have needed outside help to build -
and Pias was almost afraid to speculate on where that help could have come from.
It didn't take Pias long to find the center. There was only one place in Garridan that was both
new enough and large enough to house such a mammoth facility: a sprawling, heavily guarded
installation near the out skirts of town. The number of guards around it, and the fact that the
outside was kept brightly lit around the clock, indicated its importance to Tas's regime. It was
so thoroughly watched that it became an irresistible target of Pias's curiosity.
Many agents would simply have reported the buildings as suspicious and left it to an official
Service team of experts to investigate the inside. But going through channels might give Tas time
to cover up the true nature of his operation. Pias felt he had to go inside and take at least a
preliminary look around. He was not a computer expert and was not sure he could spot something
significant even if it was right in front of him, but comparing the place before and after an
official SOTE investigation would at least show whether changes had been made.
The building was so well guarded that Pias knew he had no chance of making a surreptitious