"2 The Alien Within" - читать интересную книгу автора (Bova Ben)

None the worse for wear, he thought. His hair was still jet black, and as thick as ever. His face had always been longer than he liked, the nose just a trifle hawkish, the chin square and firm. But there was something strange about his eyes. They were the same gray he remembered, the gray of a winter sea. But somehow they looked different; he could not pin down what it was, but his eyes had changed.

He sat up straight and let the covering sheet drop to his groin. No dizziness. His head felt clear and alert. His naked body was still lean and well muscled; in his earlier life he had driven himself mercilessly in the discipline of tae kwan do.

In my earlier life, he echoed to himself. How many years has it been?

He gripped the sheet, ready to pull it off his legs and get out of bed. But he stopped and looked up at the ceiling. The smooth white was translucent plastic. There were lights behind it. And video cameras, Stoner knew. They were watching him.

He shrugged. Take a good look, he thought.

Yanking the sheet away, he swung his long legs to the floor and stood up. The machinery on the other side of the bed emitted one small, faint peep. Stoner flinched at it, startled, then relaxed into a grin. His legs felt a little rubbery, but he knew that was to be expected after so many years. How long has it been? he wondered again as, naked, he padded to the door that had to be the bathroom.

It was. But when he came out and surveyed his room again, he saw that there was no other door to it. Half stainless-steel laboratory, half cozy bedroom--but there were no closets, no connecting doors, no door anywhere that led out of the room.











CHAPTER 2







"I am not going into a board meeting until the experiment is decided, one way or the other."

Jo Camerata said it quietly, but with an edge of steel. The two men in her office glanced at each other uneasily.

The office was clearly hers. The textured walls blazed with slashing orange and yellow stripes against a deep maroon background, the dramatic colors of the Mediterranean. The carpet was thick and patterned in matching bold tones. If she wished, Jo could change the color scheme at the touch of a dial. This morning the fiery hues of her Neapolitan ancestry suited her mood perfectly.

Two whole walls of the office were taken up by floor-to-ceiling windows. The drapes were pulled back, showing the city of Hilo and, off in the distance, the smoldering dark bulk of Mauna Loa. Through the other window wall the Pacific glittered alluringly under a bright cloudless morning sky.

Although she was president of Vanguard Industries, Jo's office held none of the usual trappings of power. It was a modest-sized room, not imposing or huge, furnished with comfortable chairs and sofas and a small round table in the corner by the windows. No desk to form a barrier between her and her visitors. No banks of computer screens and

telephone terminals. No photographs of herself alongside the great and powerful people of the hour. There was nothing in the room to intimidate her employees, nothing except her own dominant personality and unquenchable drive.

Jo sat in an ultramodern power couch of butter-soft leather the color of light caramel. Designed to resemble an astronaut's acceleration chair, it held a complete communications console and computer terminal in its armrests. Within its innards, the chair contained equipment for massage, heat therapy, and biofeedback sessions. It molded itself to the shape of her body, it could swivel or tilt back to a full reclining position at the touch of a fingertip.

But Jo was sitting up straight, her back ramrod stiff, her dark eyes blazing.

The two men sitting side by side on the low cushioned sofa both looked unhappy, but for completely different reasons. Healy, chief scientist of Vanguard Industries, wore a loose, short-sleeved white shirt over his shorts. Archie Madigan, the corporation's top lawyer, one of Jo's former lovers and still a trusted adviser, was in a more conservative shirt jacket of navy blue and soft pink slacks: the business uniform of the twenty-first-century executive male.