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

Fraden sighed wistfully, but the wistfulness did nothing to soften his
hard, angular face, handsome in its own stark way. Fraden's face was all flat
planes, sharp angles, and hard shadows playing up his deep-set dark brown eyes
and sharp though well-proportioned nose. With his hard, live face, his
large-boned, but wiry body, his thick crest of black hair, Fraden looked every
inch the predator that he was.

Bart Fraden caught his own moment of wistfulness and forced a sharp,
mocking laugh. "Hey, man," he said aloud, perhaps trying to convince himself,
"the Asteroid Belt ain't the only catfish in the sea! Easy come, easy go!"

He turned to the communicator on the stand next to his desk. It was really
time to make sure things were ready to go; in fact, it was about time to
split, if only that damned Valdez would show up already. If the Confederal
blockade kept him from getting through...

That was an eventuality that Bart Fraden did not care to consider. Things
were bad enough as they were, without ringing in theoretical disasters. The
so-called rebels-actually nothing more than regular troops of the newly
organized Confederated States of Terra--already held just about every rock in
what had been the Belt Free State except the capital worldlet of Ceres and a
few surrounding asteroids. Most important, they had already captured every
last one of the Uranium Bodies, those chunks of nearly pure pitchblende which
were the real reason for the so-called revolution in the first place. Sure,
the official flack was that the Oppressed People of the Asteroids were
rebelling against the despot Fraden so that they could join with their
Terrestrial comrades in the newly formed C.S.T., et cetera, ad infinitum, ad
nauseum. But the truth of course, as every microcephalic idiot in the solar
system over the age of two knew, was that the new amalgam of the Atlantic
Union, the Greater Soviet Union and Great China was feeling its collective
cheerios and had decided that it was tired of paying Bart Fraden good hard
cash for the Belt's uranium and that grabbing the Belt for its very own would
be cheaper in the long run. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Fraden pressed one of a large cluster of buttons and spoke into the
communicator. "Ling? Fraden here. The starship, I trust, is loaded and ready?
Good. Keep it primed for lift-off. Remember, Captain, my Swisstate bank has
orders to transfer a hundred thousand Confedollars to your numbered account
the moment we're safely beyond Pluto. Spotted Valdez's ship yet? Well, call me
the moment you do. And transfer the cargo pronto, the moment he lands. Right.
Out."

Fraden sighed and puffed on his cigar for comfort. Anyway, he thought, no
one can say that Bart Fraden can't read the handwriting on the wall.

Said handwriting had been clearly visible to Bart Fraden for the better
part of two years. The first letters had appeared when the G.S.U., the A.U.,
and Great China, scared witless by a near-miss at a three-way thermonuclear
war over some trifle that was already an obscure footnote to history, had
banded together in mutual terror to form the Confederated States of Terra. To