"Dick, Philip K - Solar Lottery v1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dick Phillip K)

Wakeman shook his head. "I won't swear him on."

"I will, then," the girl answered.

"You'll pardon me," Wakeman said. From the desk drawer he got a fifth of Scotch and poured himself a drink. "Anybody care to join me?"

"No, thanks," Eleanor said.

Benteley turned his back irritably. "What the hell is all this? Is this the way the Directorate is run?"

Wakeman smiled. "You see? Your illusions are being shattered. Stay where you are, Benteley. You don't know when you're well off."

Eleanor slid from the desk and hurried out of the room. She returned in a moment with the customary symbol-representation of the Quizmaster. "Come over here, Benteley. I'll accept your oath." She placed a small plastic flesh-colored bust of Reese Verrick in the center of the desk and turned briskly to Benteley. "Come on." As Benteley moved slowly toward the desk, she reached up and touched the cloth bag hanging from a string around his neck, the charm Lori had put there. "What kind of charm is that?" she asked him. She led him over beside her. "Tell me about it."

Benteley showed her the bit of magnetized steel and white powder. "Virgin's milk," he explained curtly.

"That's all you carry?" Eleanor indicated the array of charms dangling between her bare breasts. "I don't understand how people get by with only one charm." Her green eyes danced. "Maybe you don't get by. Maybe that's why you have bad luck."

"I have a high positive scale," Benteley began irritably. "And I have two other charms. Somebody gave me this."

"Oh?" She leaned close and examined it intently. "It looks like the kind of charm a woman would buy. Expensive, but a little too flashy."

"Is it true," Benteley asked her, "that Verrick doesn't carry any charms?"

"That's right," Wakeman spoke up. "He doesn't need them. When the bottle twitched him to One he was already class 6-3. Talk about luck—that man has it. He's risen all the way to the top, exactly as you see on the children's edutapes. Luck leaks out of his pores."

"I've seen people touch him hoping to get some of it," Eleanor said, with shy pride. "I don't blame them. I've touched him myself, many times."

"What good has it done you?" Wakeman asked quietly; he indicated the girl's discolored temples.

"I wasn't born at the same time and place as Reese," Eleanor answered shortly.

"I don't hold with astro-cosmology," Wakeman said calmly. "I think luck can be won or lost. It comes in streaks." Speaking slowly and intently to Benteley, he continued, "Verrick may have it now, but that doesn't mean hell always have it. They—" He gestured vaguely upward toward the floor above, "They like to see some kind of balance." He added hastily, "I'm not a Christian or anything like that, you understand. I know it's all random chance." He breathed

a complicated smell of peppermint and onions into Benteley's face. "But everybody gets his chance, someday. And the high and mighty always fall."

Eleanor shot Wakeman a warning look. "Be careful."

Without taking his eyes from Benteley, Wakeman said slowly, "Remember what I'm telling you. You're out of fealty; take advantage of it. Don't swear yourself on to Verrick. You'll be stuck to him, as one of his permanent serfs. And you won't like it."

Benteley was chilled. "You mean I'm supposed to take an oath directly to Verrick? Not a positional oath to the Quizmaster?"

"That's right," Eleanor said.

"Why?"

"Things are a little uncertain right now. I can't give you any more information. Later on, there'll be an assignment for you in terms of your class requirements; that's guaranteed."

Benteley gripped his briefcase and moved aimlessly away. His strategy, his plan, had fallen apart. Nothing that he had run up against here corresponded to his expectations. "Then I'm in?" he demanded, half-angrily. "I'm acceptable?"