"Chalker, Jack L - G.o.d. Inc. 2 - The Shadow Dancers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

"You'd think so. But I just can't see any opening now that wouldn't just relieve
us of the job of making the snatch. Aldrath is good at his job and I htink he's
a basically honest man, or as honest as you can get in that line of work. He
wants this higher-up so bad he can taste it. It's almost like something personal
with him."
"Which one do you think it ith?"
"Hard to say. Ioyeo and Dakani are the obvious choices, but Aldrath can haul
them in and pick their brains without their even knowing it. He says Dakani's
ambitious but hardly treasonous, and that Ioyeo really doesn't have anything in
there except animal passions. She's not as dumb as she plays, but she's no
heavyweight. No, it's one of the five. I keep thinking I should already know
which one, even from our brief meeting, but I don't know why."
"Funny. Me, too. But I juth can't get a hand on it."
"Well, one job at a time," he sighed. "I'll work on that angle while you follow
yours. If we can hand them Vogel and his master, now that's an IOU!"
I wasn't goin' nowhere right off; it was Sam who was leavin', for the team was
already pretty much in place. They had to be all set up and ready to go before I
even got there, which was fine with me, 'cept it was gonna be a real lonely,
scary couple of days.
That day they introduced me to the hypnoscan, and I was real glad Sam wasn't
around. Not that it was much of anything bein' in it-you sat down in this real
comfortable reclinin' chair and they put sensors and stuff all over you and then
packed your head in somethin' soft, so you could breathe but you couldn't see,
hear, or know much of anything. It was all done by computers, of course; they
load what they want in, then you just sorta drift off, and in what seems like a
couple minutes it's over-even though it takes hours.
It was a little weird, too, 'cause even when you woke up you didn't have no idea
that anything was changed. The doc, he brought me over and made me walk this way
and that, and I thought his voice sounded real fancy and cultured. Then he
brought me over and handed me a sheet with words on it and asked me to read it.
"Hey, Doc, ev'body know we can't read," I responded. I felt nothing odd at the
idea I couldn't read; I did feel some relief that my speech had improved some.
In fact, I had changed radically.
The thing was, they'd wiped out any way I had of gettin' to a lot of my
knowledge and skills. My ignorance was appalling, and I just took it for
granted. I was also childlike and eager to please or do whatever I was asked to
dp without question, but I walked and moved like a two-bit whore. Any deep
thoughts were just gone; so was any real sense of self-identity. I didn't know
where I was or who I was or anything, but the worst thing was that it didn't
matter to me. I had no questions. Later on, lookin' at myself in a mirror, I saw
only me reflected back with this idiotic smile. They left me in a room for a
while with the doors wide open and it never even entered my head to leave or go
anyplace I wasn't told to go.
The Nazis had forty-plus years to experiment on us in that hell world, and that
was plenty of time to take and raise children in cultural isolation and
experiment with mind-dulling drugs that left permanent marks and methods of
trainin' and all the rest. These wasn't slaves who was born in chains and wanted
freedom; these were the ends of experiments on humans that nobody on our world
would ever allow, born and bred as less than human and in their master's image.
And that was just stage one. Stage two put me out till I woke up in hell as