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

effectively blackmail any person who preferred life over wealth. (Not all did at first;
many fortunes were carried to the grave.) He didn't use this power to greatly increase
his own wealth, but rather encouraged donations and investments in areas he was
passionately involved with—the encouragement being the complex legal instrument
one must sign for the second and subsequent treatments. This not only requires a large
payment to the clinic, for services rendered, but disallows "certain modes of
divestiture"—in plain language, you can't lend anybody, or any corporation, a
significant amount of money that would be paid back after your treatment. You can't
even give it away, except to approved charities and industries.
It's no exaggeration to say that, through this selective encouragement, Lord Stileman


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 BUYING TIME - Joe Haldeman


financed the British and American presence in space in the twenty-first century.
Neither the Britannia satellite complex nor the ill-fated lunar colony Downside—not
to mention the immortals' own quixotic enterprise adastra—would have been
possible without the billions transferred from the estates of millionaires unwilling to
give everything to the Stileman Clinics …
—American Encyclopedia, 2068 edition

The clinic gave him a cheap bag with a change of clothes and two thousand dollars in small bills. He had
a pub lunch (using the pub phone to make arrangements with a local bodyguard agency) and checked
into a fleabag hotel. He sat in his room for an hour of concentrated thought, then punched up a long
number from memory and had a brief conversation in Japanese. A few minutes later the phone rang, and
he talked for a while in French. Then he checked his watch and went out for a paper and a pint.
Though Dallas was a fairly well-known personality in America and Britain, he felt comfortably
anonymous here. The Aussies were not as easily impressed by playboy money, and at any rate the stay
in the clinic had disguised him with a generally haggard look and a month of beard. He looked forward
to drinking some real beer and catching up on the news unmolested. He bought a sleazy London paper
and looked for an appropriate bar.
There were several places within a couple of blocks of the hotel, but none of them looked particularly
safe. His love of adventure didn't extend to making himself a target for griefballs and dizneys, so he
headed crosstown toward the Rocks area. The beer was more expensive there, but you wouldn't have to
sit with your back to a wall.
It was broad daylight, and Dallas looked stronger than he felt, so no one gave him any trouble beyond
the occasional shouted offer or challenge. He found an upper-middle-class bar with an interesting format
—1930's Art Deco American—and the bouncer let him in for a mere ten dollars.
He threaded his way through the chrome and glass clutter of mostly unoccupied tables to the bar, placed
his order, and unfolded the newspaper.
He didn't even get to read the headlines. While the barmaid was drawing his brew, a fat man squeezed
onto the stool next to him. "Mr. Barr," he said, not a question.
Dallas sighed and looked at the man. The bodyguard wasn't due until afternoon, and probably wouldn't
be fat. "I don't know you," he said, noting that the man's sloppy business suit could conceal a large
weapon or two, measuring the distance to his trachea, right hand automatically tensing into a stiff blade.
He had been kidnapped before.

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