"Mack Reynolds - Planetary Agent X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

snappishly.
“All right, all right,” Jakes said. “I love you, too. Send it in
when it comes.” He turned to Ronny. “What is your assignment?”
 “He wants me to go looking for some firebrand nicknamed
Tommy Paine. I’m supposed to arrest him. The commissioner said
you’d give me details.”
Sid Jakes’ face went serious. He puckered up his lips. “Wow,
that’ll be a neat trick to pull off,” he said. He flicked the order-box
switch again. Irene’s voice snapped something before he could say
anything and Sid Jakes grinned and said, “O.K., O.K., darling, but
if this is the way you’re going to be I won’t marry you. Then what
will the children say? Besides, that’s not what I called about. Have
ballistics do up a model H gun for Ronny, will you? Be sure it’s
adjusted to his code.”
He flicked off the order-box and turned back to Ronny. “I
understand you’re familiar with hand guns. It’s in this report on
you.”
Ronny nodded. He was just beginning to adjust to this
free-wheeling character. “What will I need a gun for?”
Jakes laughed. “Ye Gods, you babe in the woods. Do you
realize this Tommy Paine character has supposedly stirred up a
couple of score wars, revolutions and revolts? Not to speak of
having laid in his lap two or three dozen assassinations. He’s a
quick lad with a gun. A regular Nihilist.”
“Nihilist?”
Jakes chuckled. “When you’ve been in this Section for a while,
you’ll be familiar with every screwball outfit man has ever dreamed
up. The Nihilists were a European group, mostly Russian, back in
the Nineteenth Century. They believed that by bumping off a few
Grand Dukes and a Czar or so they could force the ruling class to
grant reforms. Sometimes they were pretty ingenious. Blew up
trains, that sort of thing.”
“Look here,” Ronny said, “what motivates this Paine fellow?
What’s he get out of all this trouble he stirs up?”
 “Search me. Nobody seems to know. Some think he’s a
mental case. For one thing, he’s not consistent.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he’ll go to one planet and break his back trying to
overthrow, say, feudalism. Then, possibly after being successful, he
goes to another planet and devotes his energies to establishing the
same socio-economic system.”
Ronny assimilated that. “You’re one of those who believes he
exists?”
“Oh, he exists, all right, all right,” Sid Jakes said happily.
“Matter of fact, I almost ran into him a few years ago.”
Ronny leaned forward. “I guess I ought to know about it. The
more information I have, the better.”
“Sure, sure,” Jakes said. “This deal of mine was on one of the
Aldebaran planets. A bunch of nature boys had settled there.”
“Nature boys?”