"John Varley - Picnic On Nearside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Varley John)

"Keep looking for these three, too," Bach said. As she turned away, she noticed that the young
officer was pregnant, about in her fifth month. She thought briefly of sending her away from the scene,
but what was the use?

Birkson saw her coming, and broke off his slow circuits of the bomb. He took the paper from
her and scanned it. He tore off the bottom part without being told it was low probability, crumpled it,
and let it drop to the floor. Scratching his head, he walked slowly back to the bomb.
 "Hans?" he called out.

"How did you know my name?" the bomb asked.

"Ah, Hans, my boy, credit us with some sense. You can't have got into this without knowing that
the MuniPol can do very fast investigations. Unless I've been underestimating you. Have I?"

"No," the bomb conceded. "I knew you would find out who I was. But it doesn't alter the
situation."

"Of course not. But it makes for easier conversation. How has life been treating you, my friend?"

"Terrible," mourned the man who had become a fifty kiloton nuclear weapon.



Every morning Hans Leiter rolled out of bed and padded into his cozy water closet. It was not
the standard model for residential apartment modules, but a special one he had installed after he
moved in. Hans lived alone, and it was the one luxury he allowed himself. In his little palace, he sat in a
chair that massaged him into wakefulness, washed him, shaved him, powdered him, cleaned his nails,
splashed him with scent, them made love to him with a rubber imitation that was a good facsimile of
the real thing. Hans was awkward with women.

He would dress, walk down three hundred meters of corridor, and surrender himself to a
pedestrian slideway which took him as far as the Cross-Crisium Tube. There, he allowed himself to be
fired like a projectile through a tunnel below the Lunar surface.

Hans worked in the Crisium Heavy Machinery Foundry. His job there was repairing almost
anything that broke down. He was good at it; he was much more comfortable with machines than with
people.

One day he made a slip and got his leg caught in a massive roller. It was not a serious accident,
because the failsafe systems turned off the machine before his body or head could be damaged, but it
hurt terribly and completed ruined the leg. It had to be taken off. While he was waiting for the cloned
replacement limb to be grown, Hans had been fitted with a prosthetic.

It had been a revelation to him. It worked like a dream, as good as his old leg and perhaps
better. It was connected to his severed leg nerve, but was equipped with a threshold cut-off circuit,
and one day when he barked his artificial shin he saw that it had caused him no pain. He recalled the
way that same injury had felt with his flesh and blood leg, and again he was impressed. He thought,
too, of the agony when his leg had been caught in the machine.

When the new leg was ready for transplanting, Hans had elected to retain the prosthetic. It was