"Gordon R. Dickson - The Last Master" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

to you at all well. Any chance you might have of getting Dr. Garranto to act in your brother’s case
is—well, impossible. Dr. Garranto specializes in unusual cases and never has any time—”
“Wally’s case isn’t unusual enough?”

The physician’s face tightened. She sat up straight in her chair.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but it looks like I’m going to have to be very frank with you. Dr. Garranto is
simply not available for ordinary cases. There’s enough work for him among the more necessary and
valuable individuals of the world to keep him occupied full-time. Even if he took your brother’s name
onto his list, he’d never get to it. And if he did, believe me, you couldn’t afford the operation.”

“Now wait a minute,” said Ett. “I may be on basic allowance, but I own an oceangoing sloop—”

“My dear Mr. Ho,” said the physician—there was a slight turn at the corner of her mouth— “if you
owned a forty-meter yacht you might have trouble meeting the costs of such an operation. Do you realize
what’s involved here? Not merely the mechanical requirements, which amount to the use of a small
hospital in themselves—but the fees for a team of six to ten physicians and technicians, each one an
expert in some particular area, from anaesthesiology to terminal states—plus subordinate medical
personnel.”

“How much?”

“There’s no way to tell.”

“Give me an outside figure.”

“There is no outside figure,” she answered. “I’ll make a guess at a minimum for you, if you like— three
hundred thousand Gross World Product units.”

Ett looked at her across the empty expanse of the desk. He had worked for six years, more or less
steadily, while living at a bare subsistence level, to buy thePixie , as his sloop was named. She was worth
at most fifteen thousand GWP units, and his citizen’s basic allowance was under a hundred units a month.

“So you see, Mr. Ho,” said the physician, after a silence. “You see how it is.”

But Ett had not yet seen…

The official assumption that nothing could be done for Wally finished the work that the news of his death
had begun. Something had penetrated his protective facade and, reaching deep into him, had set loose
the buried, unyielding self that had always been there.

Through the break in the shell of his outer being had erupted the flames of those ancient, grim fires of
decision inherited from his great-grandfather. From hidden volcanic depths had come the antagonism he
had spent twenty-four years denying. He had done his best to leave the world alone; but it had chosen to
seek him out, with this destruction of his brother. Now, that world must be made to repair the damage it
had done, and in the same unsparing, equal measure in which it had meted out its consequences to Wally.

This full reaction had not come upon Ett in one leap. It had only begun to grow as he had started
checking on what the physician had told him, about the practical impossibilities of Wally’s revival. His
first awareness that, if anything, she had been understating the problems of returning Wally to life had