"Allen Steele - Free Beer and the William Casey Society" - читать интересную книгу автора (Steele Allen)

by one Leonard Gibson, sometimes known as Lenny the Red.

The William Casey Society, of course, was the extreme right-wing
group which had taken up in the new century where the fanatics of the 20th
centuryтАФthe John Birch Society, the LaRouchians, the American Nazi
PartyтАФhad left off. Named after an old CIA chief who had died during one
of those White House scandals way back when, the Bill Casey Society had
become the cause of choice for disenfranchised Communist-haters of
every stripe, from conspiracy mavens to shell-shocked vets of Gulf War II
to survivalists disappointed that a global thermonuclear war had not
occurred. Fueled by a distrust of the new cooperation between the United
States and the Soviet UnionтАФparticularly in space, as typified by the joint
exploration of MarsтАФand led by a minor presidential candidate named
George White, the Caseyites compensated for a lack of political clout with
fervor, paranoia, and a few well-placed connections.

Space industrialization had become a favorite target of the Bill Casey
Society...in particular, SkycorpтАЩs powersat project. It was George WhiteтАЩs
contention that the building of SPS-1 was the first stage in a
Communist-backed secret operation to control the world. Skycorp was
being backed by the Soviet Union, White claimed, and the SPS network
was being established not for use as orbital power stations but as
microwave beam weapons. Once three powersats were established over
the United States and two were built in geostationary orbit above Great
Britain and Japan, Soviet moles in Skycorp and NASA would take control of
the SPS system, turn the microwave transmitters against American, British,
and Japanese armed forcesтАФnamely hypersonic bombers and
submarinesтАФand fry them, thus paving the way for Soviet global conquest.

Never mid that SPS microwave beams, designed to relay energy
from space to ground-based rectennas with as little environmental damage
as possible, barely had the power to blister the paint job on a bomber or a
sub. Never mind that the Soviets were building their own SPS system in
orbit above the U.S.S.R., or that the Kremlin had better fish to fryтАФso to
speakтАФthan whacky schemes of global domination. But this kind of
paralogia always finds an audience, and it keeps the tax-free contributions
rolling in.
 The Caseyites, to their credit, realized that the SPS construction
crews on Olympus stationтАФthe latest generation of high-risk blue-collar
all-American hardhatsтАФwere unlikely to be Communist sympathizers, but
were only guilty of ignorance. This was obviously the soft belly of the
commie plot. So the Caseyites went so far as to plant its own agent on
Skycan, picking a member from its ranks to go to work on Olympus Station
in an effort to convince the beamjacks that there was a plot afoot and to
convert them to the Caseyite cause.

That person was Leonard Gibson, a thin and somewhat wild-eyed
former arc welder for Martin Marietta, who managed to get a job as a
beamjack on Skycan.