"Alan Dean Foster - The Man Who Used the Universe" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

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The Man Who Used The Universe
by Alan Dean Foster
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Copyright (c)1983 by Alan Dean Foster


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INTO THE OUT OF
TO THE VANISHING POINT
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_For Dick and Marge Green,_
who helped move the Lazy Unicorn, with love and thanks.
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*I*
It's very old, the protection racket. So are murder, prostitution,
graft, and a number of other sordid frailties that technology cannot seem to
cure. These faults are not exclusively human. They're found in other
intelligent races. But it's in mankind that technological advancement has
outpaced the social to a degree unmatched by any other sentient species.
Longevity institutionalizes vice as well as virtue. Sex has been for
sale longer than salvation; stealing money has always been more popular than
working for it. It was inevitable that a maturing society unable to eliminate
such ills would learn to cope with them. Government was agreeable. Anything,
which can be coped with, can be formalized, and anything, which can be
formalized, can be taxed.
So it was that Kees vaan Loo-Macklin found himself outside the simple
shop front in commercial corridor B of the hundred-kilometer-long cylinder
that was the city of Cluria and considered how to go about killing his first
man.
There wasn't much of a crowd milling about the darkening street. It was
late in the afternoon, almost evening, close to closing time for most shops
and businesses. Feeble light fell through the transparent, arching roof of the
city, dirty yellow after its fight with the pollutants trapped beneath the
permanent inversion layer that covered most of the world.