"Niven, Larry - Cloak Of Anarchy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

The lantern-jawed man finished his work, and twisted something, and the motor started with a roar. Black smoke puffed out. In triumph he gripped the handles. Outside, it was a prison offense to build a working internal combustion machine. Here -
With the fire of dedication burning in his eyes, he wheeled his internal machine across the grass. He left a path as flat as a rug. It was a Free Park, wasn't it?
The smell hit everyone at once: black dirt in the air, a stink of Half-burned hydrocarbons attacking nose and eyes. I gasped and coughed. I'd never smelled anything like it.
The crowd roared and converged.
He squawked when they picked up his machine. Someone found a switch and stopped it. Two men confiscated the tool kit and went to work with screwdriver and hammer. The owner objected. He picked up a heavy pair of pliers and tried to commit murder.
A copseye zapped him and the man with the hammer, and they both hit the lawn without bouncing. The rest of them pulled the lawn mower apart and bent and broke the pieces.

"I'm half sorry they did that," said the old woman. "Sometimes I miss the sound of lawn mowers. My dad used to mow the lawn on Sunday mornings."
I said, `It's a Free Park."


"Then why can't he build anything he pleases?"
"He can. He did. Anything he's free to build, we're free to kick apart." And my mind finished, Like Ron's rigged copseye.
Ron was good with tools. It would not surprise me a bit if he knew enough about copseyes to knock out the whole system.
Maybe someone ought to stop him.
But knocking down copseyes wasn't illegal. It happened all the time. It was part of the freedom of the Park. If Ron could knock. them all down at once, well -
Maybe someone ought to stop him.
I passed a flock of high school girls, all chittering like birds, all about sixteen. It might have been their first trip inside a Free Park. I looked back because they were so cute, and caught them staring in awe and wonder at the dragon on my back.
A few years and they'd be too blasй to notice. It had taken Jill almost half an hour to apply it this morning: a glorious red-and-gold dragon breathing flames across my shoulder, flames that seemed to glow by their own light. Lower down were a princess and a knight in golden armor, the princess tied to a stake, the knight fleeing for hip life. I smiled back at the girls, and two of them waved.

Short blond hair and golden skin, the tallest girl in sight, wearing not even a nudist's shoulder pouch: Jill Hayes stood squarely in front of the Wilshire entrance, visibly wondering where I was. It was five minutes after three.
There was this about living with a physical culture nut. Jill insisted on getting me into shape. The daily exercises were part of that. and so was this business of walking half the length of King's Free Park...
I'd balked at doing it briskly, though. Who walks briskly in a Free Park? There's too much to see. She'd given me an hour; I'd held out for three. It was a compromise, like the paper slacks I was wearing despite Jill's nudist beliefs.
Sooner or later she'd find someone with muscles, or I'd relapse into laziness, and we'd split. Meanwhile . . . we got along. It seemed only sensible to let her finish my training.
She spotted me, yelled, "Russel! Here!" in a voice that must have reached both clods of the Park.


In answer I lifted my arm, semaphore-style, slowly over my head and back down.
And every copseye in King's Free Park fell out of the sky, dead.
Jill looked about her at all the startled faces and all the golden bubbles resting in bushes and on the grass. She approached me somewhat uncertainly. She asked, "Did you do that?"
I said, "Yah. If I wave my arms again, they'll all go back up."
"I think you'd better do it," she said primly. Jill had a fine poker face. I waved my arm grandly over my head and down, but of course, the copseyes stayed where they had fallen.
Jill said, "I wonder what happened to them?"
"It was Ron Cole. You remember him. He's the one who engraved some old Michelob beer bottles for Steuben -"
"Oh, yes. But how?"
We went off to ask him.
A brawny college man howled and charged past us at a dead run. We saw him kick a copseye like a soccer ball. The golden cover split, but the man howled again and hopped up and down hugging ills foot.
We passed dented golden shells and broken resonators and bent parabolic reflectors. One woman looked flushed and proud; she was wearing several of the copper toroids as bracelets. A kid vas collecting the cameras. Maybe he thought he could sell them outside.
I never saw an intact copseye after the first minute.
They weren't all busy kicking copseyes apart. Jill stared at the conservatively dressed group carrying POPULATION BY COPULATION signs, and wanted to know if they were serious. Their grim-faced leader handed us pamphlets that spoke of the evil and the blasphemy of Man's attempts to alter himself through gene tampering and extrauterine growth experiments. If it was a put-on, it was a good one.
We passed seven little men, each three to four feet high, traveling with a single tall, pretty brunette. They wore medieval garb. We both stared; but I was the one who noticed the makeup and the use of UnTan. African pigmies, probably part of a UN-sponsored tourist group; and the girl must be their guide.
Ron Cole was not where I had left him.


"He must have decided that discretion is the better part of cowardice. May be right, too," I surmised. "Nobody's ever knocked down all the copseyes before."
"It's not illegal, is it?"
"Not illegal, but excessive. They can bar him from the Park, at the very least."
Jill stretched in the sun. She was all golden, and big. She said. "I'm thirsty. Is there a fountain around?"
"Sure, unless someone's plugged it by now. It's a-"
"Free Park. Do you mean to tell me they don't even protect the fountains?"