"Niven, Larry - Madness Has It's Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

Anton managed a credible laugh. "I'm not the kid anymore. I'm a weekly."
The ARM had made me a weekly at forty-eight. They couldn't turn me loose at the end of the day anymore because my body chemistry couldn't shift fast enough. So they kept me in the ARM building Monday through Thursday and gave me all of Thursday afternoon to shed the schitz madness. Another twenty years of that and I was even less flexible, so they retired me.
I said, "You do have to remember. When you're in the ARM building, you're a paranoid schizophrenic. You have to be able to file that when you're outside."
"Hah. How can anyone-"
"You get used to the schitz. After I quit, the difference was amazing. No fears, no tension, no ambition."
"No Charlotte?"
"Well . . . I turned boring. And what are you doing here?"
Anton looked around. "Much the same thing you are, I guess. lack, am I the youngest one here?"
"Maybe." I looked around, double-checking. A woman was distracting me, though I could see only her back and a flash - of a laughing profile. Her back was slender and strong, and a thick white braid ran down her spine, two and a half feet of clean, thick white hair. She was in an animated conversation with a blond companion of Anton's age plus a few.
LARRY NIVEN 303
But they were at a table for two: they weren't inviting company. I forced my attention back. "We're gray singles, Anton. The young ones tend to get the message quick. We're slower than we used to be. We date. You want to order?"
Alcohol wasn't popular there. Anton must have noticed, but he ordered guava juice and vodka and drank as if he needed it. This looked worse than Thursday jitters. I let him half finish, then said, "Assuming you can tell me-"
"I don't know anything."
"I know the feeling. What should you know?"
The tension eased behind Anton's eyes. "There was a message from the Angel's Pencil."
"Pencil . . . oh." My mental reflexes had slowed down. The Angel's Pencil had departed twenty years earlier for . . . was it Epsilon Eridani? "Come on, kid, it'll be in the boob cubes before you have quite finished speaking. Anything from deep space is public property."
"Hah! No. It's restricted. I haven't seen it myself. Only a reference, and it must be more than ten years old."
That was peculiar. And if the Belt stations hadn't spread the news through the solar -system, that was peculiar. No wonder Anton was antsy. ARMs react that way to puzzles.
Anton seemed to jerk himself back to the here and now, back to the gray singles regime. "Am I cramping your style?"
"No problem. Nobody hurries in the Monobloc. If you see someone you like -" My fingers danced over lighted symbols on the rim of the table. "This gets you a map. Locate where she's sitting, put the cursor on it. That gets you a display . . . hmm."
I'd set the cursor on the white-haired lady. I liked the readout. "Phoebe Garrison, seventy-nine, eleven or twelve years older than you. Straight. Won a second in the Gray Jumps last year . . . that's the Americas skiing matches for seventy and over. She could kick your tail if you don't watch your manners. It says she's smarter than eve are, too.
"Point is, she can check you out the same way. Or me. And she probably found this place through the Velvet Net, which is the computer network for unlocked lifestvles."
304 MADNESS HAS ITS PLACE
"So. Two males sitting together-"
"Anyone who thinks we're bent can check if she cares enough. Bends don't come to the Monobloc, anyway. But if we want company, we should move to a bigger table."
We did that. I caught Phoebe Garrison's companion's eye. They played with their table controls, discussed, and presently wandered over.
Dinner turned into a carouse. Alcohol was involved, but we'd left the Monobloc by then. When we split up, Anton was with Michiko. I went home with Phoebe.

Phoebe had fine legs, as I'd anticipated, though both knees were Teflon and plastic. Her face was lovely even in morning sunlight. Wrinkled, of course. She was two weeks short of eighty and wincing in anticipation. She ate with a cross-country skier's appetite. We spoke of our lives as we ate.
She'd come to Santa Maria to visit her oldest grandson. In her youth she'd done critical work in nanoengineering. The Board had allowed her four children. (I'd known I was outclassed.) All were married, scattered across the Earth, and so were the grandkids.
My two sons had emigrated to the Belt while still in their twenties. I'd visited them once during an investigation trip paid for by the United Nations
"You were an ARM? Really? How interesting! Tell me a story..
.
if you can."
"That's the problem, all right."
The interesting tales were all classified. The ARM suppresses dangerous technology. What the ARM buries is supposed to stay buried. I remembered a kind of time compressor and a field that would catalyze combustion, both centuries old. Both were first used for murder. If turned loose or rediscovered, either would generate more interesting tales yet.
I said, "I don't know anything current. They bounced me out when I got too old. Now I run construction robots at various spaceports."
"Interesting?"
LARRY NIVEN 305

"Mostly placid." She wanted a story? Okay. The ARM enforced more than the killer-tech laws, and some of those tales I could tell.
"We don't get many mother hunts these days. This one was wished on us by the Belt." And I told her about a lunie who'd sired two clones. One he'd raised on the moon, and one he'd left in the, Saturn Conserve. He'd moved to Earth, where one clone is any normal citizen's entire birthright. When we found him, he was arranging to culture a third clone . . .

I dreamed a bloody dream.
It was one of those: I was able to take control, to defeat what had attacked me. In the black of an early Sunday morning the shreds of the dream dissolved before I could touch them, but the sensations remained. I felt strong, balanced, powerful, victorious.
It took me a few minutes to become suspicious of this particular flavor of wonderful, but I'd had practice. I eased out from under Phoebe's arm and leg and got out of bed. I lurched into the medical alcove, linked myself up, and fell asleep on the table.
Phoebe found me there in the morning. She asked, "Couldn't that wait till after breakfast?"
"I've got four years on you and I'm going for infinity. So I'm careful," I told her. Let her think the tube carried vitamins. It wasn't quite a lie . . . and she didn't quite believe me, either.

On Monday Phoebe went off to let her eldest grandson show her the local museums. I went back to work.