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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
reshuffle among those who remain. He follows each of the departing members and
discovers that three die and several of the rest are transferred to major
positions elsewhere in the company-positions that are, nevertheless, in places
like
Antarctica and Ceres. Some of the others are shuttled out when they undergo a
crystal-medium brain transfer into another body, taking demotions until the
board can determine if their performance has been hampered by the transfer.
Cowboy concludes that Couceiro is at this point consolidating his hold on the
board and keeping his opposition divided by sending them out into far-off
assignments in the field.
There is another flurry of movement on the board just two years later,
Page 101
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
directors swapping portfolios back and forth, another director shuttling out
entirely. Cowboy can see a pointer floating in the lattice indicating a news
item culled from a MediaNet screamsheet report. He follows the pointer and
absorbs the report, discovering that this latest movement represents the
collapse of an attempt by the old chairman, Albrecht Roon, to regain his
office, a move that fails by only a single vote. Before Couceiro's assumption
of power Roon had been chairman for eighteen years, before getting his brain
shunted to a new body at the age of seventy-nine and being demoted to the
Asteroid Resource Commission-a major post in a bloc stronger in space
transportation, but at Tempel the equivalent of Siberia. From there Roon
attempts his comeback and fails, one of his
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d.txt supporters on the board being retired permanently and replaced with one
of Couceiro's people, Roon himself being moved downside to head South American
Marketing.
That suggests a major fall from grace, from chairman atop the gravity well to
exile in
South America within the space of a few years. Cowboy follows Roon's career up
and down the Tempel construct, then follows Couceiro's, something he's done
before. The available information doesn't seem very forthcoming. He's going to
have to dig deeper.
He lets the interface fade from his mind and discovers that the Dodger is
gone, probably for his afternoon nap, and that Jimi has fallen asleep in his
chair, his drink sitting between his thighs, collecting dew. Cowboy quietly
leaves the house and gets into his Packard, then cycles up the engine and
moves down the switchback paths to the old town of Cimarron, built long ago by
that cheerful old scoundrel Lucien Bonaparte Maxwell, friend to Christopher
Carson and William Bonney, the whole town built because Maxwell owned the
largest land grant in the history of the world and thought there ought by
rights to be a town on it. Cowboy studs the Packard's computer into a phone
line and starts calling libraries.
The data's easy enough to find now that he knows what he's looking for in the
library crystal. Roon was born in Bonn, went to school in Leipzig and
collected a degree in chemistry, then joined Tempel Pharmaceuticals I.G. in
the same year it began building its first orbital drug factory. His first
assignment in space was shortly thereafter, and the company kept him busy
shuttling up and down for a decade or so, before the company headquarters went
into orbit and Roon went up with them.
Once he was Tempel's chairman, he pushed for independence for the Orbitals, at
one point ordered his jocks into the asteroid belt in defiance of the Space
Control Commission, something that took a lot of nerve considering the fact
that Tempel wasn't a major mining company and had only a few ships to send.
Roon was a founder of the first Orbital Bloc Congress, second in power only to
Grechko. It appears that many of the Bloc Congress programs originated with
Roon, but he was willing to stay out of the spotlight and let Grechko take the
heat for them. After the Rock
War, Roon was behind the policy of the balkanization of the major Earth powers
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zanotowane.pldoc.pisz.plpdf.pisz.plkwiatpolny.htw.pl
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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