"Joe Haldeman - Buying Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

records.
When he'd hurtled down the side of that cliff, Dallas had been in the ninth year of his current
rejuvenation. A disastrous poker game in Adelaide, which he'd hoped would put him over the million-
pound mark, had left him with less than fifty thousand Australian dollars. He had about two years to
multiply that by sixty.
Most of the people he dealt with over the next eighteen months did not know him as Dallas Barr, the
rather conspicuous American playboy. Many of them did not know he was an immortal. He had a
number of personas scattered around the world, most with impeccable credit references, even if they
were currently short of liquid assets. He vouched for himself and then at usurious rates lent himself
borrowed money, some of which was invested quietly, some conspicuously, weaving a complex skein of
notes and handshakes and whispered confidences that eventually, inevitably, began to generate real
money. He made his million and put it in a safe place and then spent a couple of months ensuring
discreetly that when Dallas Barr walked out of that clinic young again and nearly flat broke, he wouldn't
stay broke for long.
He did decide to be Dallas Barr a third time, though it meant public immortality. (He had been public
once before, as Georges Andric, who "died" attempting to scale Everest alone.) The notoriety was
sometimes pleasant and always profitable, though it involved some risk. Despite all the evidence to the
contrary, there were people who thought the Stileman immortals made up an underground cabal that
ruled the world. There were no statistics—if the clinics kept records, they didn't release them—but it
seemed likely that the second most frequent cause of death among immortals was assassination, usually
spectacular, by some crazy who thought he was saving the world from a conspiracy.
No immortal ever remembered exactly what happened during the month of rejuvenation therapy. This
was for sanity more than security. The first three weeks were sustained agony, beyond imagination,

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being pulled apart and put back together; the last week was sleep and forgetting. When he left the
Sydney clinic this ninth time Dallas Barr felt, as always, renewed but deeply rattled: a strong man of a
hundred and thirty who couldn't remember the nine times he had begged for the release of death.

Stileman, Geoffrey Parke, MP, 1950-2055

Lord Stileman is, of course, best remembered as having founded the immortality
clinics that still bear his name, but even before that accomplishment he was a
prominent (perhaps notorious) public figure.
Born into considerable wealth, Stileman was nevertheless, from his earliest years, an
outspoken enemy of privilege. As a New Labour MP, though, he turned out to be
anything but doctrinaire, apparently following the dictates of his conscience even
when that led him into the Tory camp. So he was never a great success as a practical
politician, not being willing to compromise, but his rhetorical ability and striking
camera presence made him a valuable asset to a variety of liberal and libertarian
causes.
In 1991 a group of medical researchers approached him with the outline of what the
Stileman Process (q.v.) would be. It was one of them, not Lord Stileman himself, who
had come up with the idea of using the process as a way to delimit the accumulation
of private wealth: past a certain age, in order to stay alive, a wealthy person must
become a relative pauper every ten years.
Once the process had been demonstrated, Lord Stileman was in a position to