"Eric Frank Russell - The Waitabits" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

THE WAITABITS
Eric Frank Russell
Science-fiction authors, however various their output, are not
chameleons. To be sure, in a good cause they can alter certain parts of
their basic colouration with marvellous flexibility and skill; but the
essentials are unchanging - and recurrently we find in their work a
whole-hearted reversion to whatever their true blue may happen to be.
With Eric Frank Russell this hue is a hatred of bullying, of brass-hats, of
bureaucrats and of do-gooders who somehow always seem to end up
doing more good to themselves than to anyone else; and he has added
enormously to the gaiety of nations by envisaging sundry forms of
natural immunity to such plagues. At first sight, Russell's antibodies to
the eternal take-over bid may seem irrelevant for the reason that they
are fanciful, and therefore not, for us-here-now, by any stretch of the
imagination practical politics; we, after all, are not the fortunate
inhabitants of Eterna. Jet we can, and do, delight with Russell in their
oblivious bloodless victory; and in doing so we adopt, or confirm, a
moral attitude which would like to believe in the indefeasibility of all
harmless underdogs, always and everywhere.


He strode toward the Assignment Office with quiet confidence born of
long service, much experience and high rank. Once upon a time a
peremptory call to this department had made him slightly edgy exactly as
it unnerved the fresh-faced juniors today. But that had been long, long
ago. He was grey-haired now, with wrinkles around the corners of his eyes,
silver oak-leaves on his epaulettes. He had heard enough, seen enough and
learned enough to have lost the capacity for surprise.
Markham was going to hand him a tough one. That was Markham's
job: to rake through a mess of laconic, garbled, distorted or eccentric
reports, pick out the obvious problems and dump them squarely in the
laps of whoever happened to be hanging around and was considered
suitable to solve them. One thing could be said in favour of this technique:
its victims often were bothered, bedevilled or busted but at least they were
never bored. The problems were not commonplace, the solutions
sometimes fantastic.
The door detected his body-heat as he approached, swung open with
silent efficiency. He went through, took a chair, gazed phlegmatically at
the heavy man behind the desk.
"Ah, Commodore Leigh," said Markham pleasantly. He shuffled some
papers, got them in order, surveyed the top one. "I am informed that the
Thunderer's overhaul is complete, the crew has been recalled and
everything is ready for flight."
"That is correct."
"Well now, I have a task for you." Markham put on the sinister smile
that invariably accompanied such an announcement. After years of
reading what had followed in due course, he had conceived the notion that
all tasks were funny except when they involved a massacre. "You are ready
and eager for another trip, I trust?"
"I am always ready," said Commodore Leigh. He had outgrown the