"Jerry Pournelle - Extreme Prejudice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

EXTREME PREJUDICE
The difference between a shark and an assassin is a matter of motivation.
by JERRY POURNELLE



There were only nine people on the airplane, but the stewardess forgot to serve me coffee. I should
have been nattered. In my job, being inconspicuous is an important talent; but I hadn’t been trying to be
invisible, and it infuriated me. By the time we were six hundred miles southwest of the southern tip of
Baja California, I’d made a scene and the girl wouldn’t forget me, ever.
I was ashamed of myself long before it was over. The whole point to my job is to make the United
Spates a better place to live. We’ve no business spreading unhappiness for our own gratification. We do
enough of that as official duties.
Dansworth station sits seven hundred miles southwest of Baja, and we’d been flying over blue water
for hours. I remembered the old days of fast jets and squirmed around lit a match to all that oil. There
wasn’t anything to look at below, no islands, and from our cruising altitude I couldn’t see waves or
whitecaps. There was just that deep blue and the steady rumbling whine of the engines to lull me toward
sleepiness but keep me from sleeping. Then the water changed color.
It was many shades of blue, and green, and red, and yellow, all boiling up blue-white in the center of
each patch and then the colors spreading outward in great streaks. Most of Dansworth is under water, so
those, enormous color patches were all I could see.
The plane circled lower as the stewardess, still not looking at me, gave her little spiel about seatbelts
and having a pleasant trip. There was an airstrip floating in the water. It wasn’t very wide, but over three
thousand feet long, and there were buildings along its sides at the lee end. A dirigible mooring mast
floated on its own platform not far away. The plane rolled to a stop at that end of the runway.
A regular grid of concrete domes dotted, the sea around the airstrip, and farther away were big
floating docks. A couple of newly painted-“ oceangoing ships were alongside. The whole place was
clean and bright, different from any city I’d been in recently. Somehow the new planned cities, the
”arcologies,“ never seem to look this bright and new; but we’re getting there. We have to.
Dark kelp patches grew between the isolated domes, and the water was so clear that I could see
platforms about fifty feet below the surface. Silvery torpedo-shapes flashed through the kelp, and
sail-boats cruised amoung the domes, their bows throwing up white spumes as they raced with the wind.
They didn’t have“ the look of yachts. Just a means of transportation.
Dr. Peterson himself was there to meet me. I strutted a bit for the benefit of the other passengers, and
the stewardess looked worried, as she should have. Ignoring passengers Who rate a planeside meeting
from the civilian director could get her into a lot of trouble, and jobs are pretty scarce. She wasn’t
wearing any rings, so she was reasonably safe from the new “One Job Per Family” program, but I
understand the Federal Employment Commission is looking into that, too. Married women voters don’t
appreciate single girls who have jobs when there are still many families with no job at all…
Peterson wasn’t wearing anything but a pair of shorts and a wide-brimmed hat, and he looked at my
lightweight drip-dry suit with sym-“ pathy. I’ve worn it on so many assignments that it seems like an old
friend, and even in hot weather I’m Comfortable in it. I thought I’d lost it once when Hertzog’s blood
spurted all over me, but it washed out all right. I’ve never got any of my own on it, maybe that’s why I
like it. A good luck charm.
I was surprised at how cool it seemed there- in the tropic mid-afternoon. The sun was high and bright
overhead, the sky impossibly blue with only tiny white fleecy clouds scudding across. I haven’t seen a
sky like that since I last went hiking in the Sierras. Yet, despite the hot sun, the west wind was cool.
Peterson had a tan like old “ leather. So did everyone else moving around the floating airstrip. It
made me feel that I must look like something that had crawled out from under a rock. A part of me said
that might not be too bad a description, and I thrust it away. It’s bad enough getting doubts in the middle