"Harlan Ellison - Pa" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ellison Harlan)

Ball nodded, still wearing the insipid grin of the medical ghoul. He was wearing it as Pareti took two quick,
short steps and jacked a fist into the doctor’s stomach, just below the heart. Ball’s eyes seemed to extrude almost as
the goo extruded, and his face went three shades of gray toward matching his lab smock. Pareti held him up under the
chin with his left hand and drove a short, straight right directly into the doctor’s nose.
Ball flailed backward and hit the glass-fronted instrument case, breaking the glass with a crash. Ball settled to
the floor, still conscious, but in awful pain. He stared up at Pareti as the harvester turned toward the door. Pared
turned back momentarily, smiling for the first time since he had entered the sick bay.
“That’s a helluva bedside manner you’ve got there, Doc.”
Then he left.

He was forced to leave the TexasTower within the hour, as the law proscribed. He received a final
statement of the back pay due him for the nine-month shift he had been working. He also received a sizeable
termination bonus. Though everyone knew Ashton’s Disease was not contagious, when he passed Peggy Flinn on his
way to the exit lock, she looked at him sadly and said goodbye, but would not kiss him farewell. She looked sheepish.
“Whore,” Pareti murmured under his breath, but she heard him..
A Company lift had been sent for him. A big fifteen-passenger job with two stewardesses, a lounge, movie
theater and pocket billiard accommodations. Before he was put on board, the Projects Superintendent, head man on
the TexasTower, spoke to him at the lock.
“You aren’t a Typhoid Mary, you can’t give it to anyone. It’s merely unlovely and unpredictable. That’s what
they tell me. Technically, there’s no quarantine; you can go where you please. But realistically, you can appreciate that
your presence in the surface cities wouldn’t be welcome. Not that you’d be missing much...all the action is
underground.”
Pareti nodded silently. He was well over his shaken reactions of earlier. He was now determined to fight the
Disease with the strength of his own will.
“Is that it?” he asked the Projects Super.
The man nodded, and extended his hand.
Pareti hesitated a moment, then shook it.
As Pareti was walking down the ramp to the lift, the Projects Super called after him. “Hey, Pareti?”
Joe turned back.
“Thanks for belting that bastard Ball. I’ve been itching to do it for six years.” He grinned.
It was an embarrassed, brave little smile that Joe Pareti returned, as he said goodbye to who he was and what
he was, and boarded the lift for the real world.

He had free passage to the destination of his choice. He chose East pyrites. If he was going to make a new
life for himself with the money he had saved in three years working the goo fields, at least he was going to do it after
one king-sized wore leave. It had been nine months since he had been anywhere near excitement-you sure as hell
couldn’t call Peggy Flinn with her flat-chest, excitement--and there was time for fun before the time to settle down.
One of the stewardesses, wearing an off-the-bosom jumper with a “kicki” skirt, paused beside his seat and
smiled down at him. “Care for a drink?”
Pareti’s thoughts were hardly of liquor. She was a high-breasted, long-legged item with light turquoise hair.
But he knew she had been apprised of his ailment, and her reaction would be the same as Peggy Flinn’s.
He smiled up at her, thinking of what he would like to do with her if she were amenable. She took his hand
and led him back to one of the washrooms. She led him inside, bolted the door, and dropped her clothes. Pareti was
so astonished he had to let her undress him. It was cramped and close in the tiny bathroom, but the stewardess was
marvelously inventive, not to mention limber.
When she was done with him, her face flushed, her neck spotted with little purple love-bites, her eyes
almost feverish, she mumbled something about being unable to resist him, gathered up her clothes without even
putting them on and, with acute embarrassment, floundered out of the bathroom, leaving him standing there with his
pants down around his shoes.
Pareti looked at himself in the mirror. Again. He seemed to be doing nothing but staring into mirrors today.