"Norman Spinrad - The Men in the Jungle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Spinrad Norman)

CHAPTER ONE




Bart Fraden sat loosely on the edge of the desk, a strange mixture of
tension and repose, like a hunting cat at rest. What the hell, he thought,
biting off another savory piece of pheasant leg, you can't expect to ride the
same gravy train forever.

He dropped the pheasant leg casually back onto the tooled silver tray
which rested on the heavily waxed walnut desk top, picked up the half-full
bottle of chilled Rhine wine, and washed down the bit of fowl with a small
swallow. The wine was good, it was damned good and it had better be,
considering that each bottle of the stuff set the Belt Free State back thirty
Confedollars.

The pheasant, on the other hand, was kind of dry and overdone. But after
all, Fraden thought indulgently, Ah Ming must be having a hard time
concentrating on his cooking with the good old Belt Free State falling in
around our ears.

Ah Ming, after all, as personal chef to the President of the B.F.S., had a
nice little thing going here on Ceres, and, Fraden knew, strictly from outside
observation, the average cat pretty much goes ape when the bird in his hand
suddenly begins to take wing.

It was an attitude that Bart Fraden found utterly alien. After all, a cat
with a given talent just had to stick his nose in the air and sniff out the
proper arena for his particular line of evil. When one flower runs dry on
nectar, the bee goes on to the next. A chef as good as Ah Ming could carve
himself out a nice little niche anywhere from Earth to Antares. He could do
something superlatively that most men couldn't do at all. That, after all, was
the only security any man, chef or politician, could ever really have.

Fraden reached across his desk and took a big Havana cigar out of the
hand-carved ivory desk-humidor. He sniffed at it appreciatively for a moment,
then stuck it in his mouth and lit it. He sucked rich smoke and stared for one
wistful moment around the office--at the teak-paneled walls, the red wool
wall-to-wall carpeting, the Picasso, the Calder, the Mallinstein, the wall bar
stocked with the best booze, every drop of it imported all the way from Earth,
the constant-humitemp closet filled with cases of cigars...

Quite a layout for the Asteroid Belt. This room alone must've cost
something like ten thousand Belt Dollars. There was nothing like the
Presidential Dome this side of Mars--wood, food, cigars, whiskey...And every
bit of it imported directly from Earth at enormous expense to the B.F.S.
treasury. The first and last President of the Belt Free State lived in high
style.