"Dick - We Can Remember it For You Wholesale" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

same one that motivated him to volunteer for the assignment
in the first place."
The other technician, Keeler, said to McClane, "What do
we do? Graft a false memory-pattern over the real memory?
There's no telling what the results would be; he might
remember some of the genuine trip, and the confusion might
bring on a psychotic interlude. He'd have to hold two oppo-
site premises in his mind simultaneously: that he went to Mars
and that he didn't. That he's a genuine agent for Interplan
and he's not, that it's spurious. I think we ought to revive him
without any false memory implantation and send him out of
here; this is hot."
"Agreed," McClane said. A thought came to him. "Can
you predict what he'll remember when he comes out of
sedation?"
"Impossible to tell," Lowe said. "He probably will have
some dim, diffuse memory of his actual trip, now. And he'd
probably be in grave doubt as to its validity; he'd probably
decide our programming slipped a gear-tooth. And he'd
remember coming here; that wouldn't be erasedunless you
want it erased."
"The less we mess with this man," McClane said, "the
better I like it. This is nothing for us to fool around with;
we've been foolish enough toor unlucky enough toun-
cover a genuine Interplan spy who has a cover so perfect that
up to now even he didn't know what he wasor rather is."
The sooner they washed their hands of the man calling
himself Douglas Quail the better.
"Are you going to plant packets Three and Sixty-two in his
conapt?" Lowe said.
"No," McClane said. "And we're going to return half his
fee."
"Half! Why half?"
McClane said lamely, "It seems to be a good compromise."
As the cab carried him back to his conapt at the residential
end of Chicago, Douglas Quail said to himself, It's sure good
to be back on Terra.
Already the month-long period on Mars had begun to
waver in his memory; he had only an image of profound
gaping craters, an ever-present ancient erosion of hills, of
vitality, of motion itself. A world of dust where little hap-
pened, where a good part of the day was spent checking and
rechecking one's portable oxygen source. And then the life
forms, the unassuming and modest gray-brown cacti and
maw-worms.
As a matter of fact he had brought back several moribund
examples of Martian fauna; he had smuggled them through
customs. After all, they posed no menace; they couldn't
survive in Earth's heavy atmosphere.
Reaching into his coat pocket he rummaged for the con-