"Robert A. Heinlein - Friday" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

went away.
"Adolf Belsen" took the tube to Cairo, then semiballistic to Hong Kong, where he had
reserved a room at the Peninsula, all courtesy of Diners Club.
"Albert Beaumont" was on vacation. He took Safari Jets to Timbuktu, where American Express
had placed him for two weeks at the luxury Shangri-La on the shore of the Sahara Sea.
The Bank of Hong Kong paid "Arthur Bookman's" way to Buenos Aires.
"Archibald Buchanan" visited his native Edinburgh, travel prepaid by MasterCard. Since he
could do it all by tube, with one transfer at Cairo and automated switching at Copenhagen, he
should be at his ancestral home in two hours.
I then used the travel computer to make a number of inquiries- but no reservations, no
purchases, and temporary memory only.
Satisfied, I left the booth, asked the dimpled attendant whether or not the subway
entrance I saw in the lobby would let me reach the Fat Man restaurant.
She told me what turns to make. So I went down into the subway-and caught the tube for
Mombasa, again paying cash.
Mombasa is only thirty minutes, 450 kilometers, from Nairobi, but it is at sea level,
which makes Nairobi's climate seem heavenly; I got out as quickly as I could arrange it. So,
twenty-seven hours later I was in the Illinois Province of the Chicago Imperium. A long time, you
might say, for a great-circle arc of only thirteen thousand kilometers. But I didn't travel great
circle and did not go through a customs barrier or an immigration checkpoint. Nor did I use a
credit card, even a borrowed one. And I managed to grab seven hours of sleep in Alaska Free State;
I hadn't had any sound sleep since leaving Ell-Five space city two days earlier.
How? Trade secret. I may never need that route again but someone in my line of work will
need it. Besides, as my boss says, with all governments everywhere tightening down on everything
wherever they can, with their computers and their Public Eyes and ninetynine other sorts of
electronic surveillance, there is a moral obligation on each free person to fight back wherever
possible-keep underground railways open, keep shades drawn, give misinformation to computers.
Computers are literal-minded and stupid; electronic records aren't really records . . . so it is
good to be alert to opportunities to foul up the system. If you can't evade a tax, pay a little


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too much to confuse their computers. Transpose digits. And so on. .
The key to traveling half around a planet without leaving tracks is:
Pay cash. Never credit, never anything that goes into a computer. And a bribe is never a bribe;
any such transfer of valuta must save face for the recipient. No matter how lavishly overpaid,
civil servants everywhere are convinced that they are horribly underpaid- but all public employees
have larceny in their hearts or they wouldn't be feeding at the public trough. These two facts are
all you need-but be careful!-a public employee, having no self-respect, needs and demands a show
of public respect.
I always pander to this need and the trip had been without incident. (I didn't count the
fact that the Nairobi Hilton blew up and
burned a few minutes after I took the tube for Mombasa; it would have seemed downright paranoid to
think that it had anything to do with me.)
I did get rid of four credit cards and a passport just after I heard about it but I had
intended to take that precaution anyhow. If the opposition wanted to cancel me-possible but
unlikely-it would be swatting a fly with an ax to destroy a multimillion-crown property and kill
or injure hundreds or thousands of others just to get me. Unprofessional.