"L. Sprague De Camp - The Gnarly Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

assailants went down in a yammering tangle.
One was still up. Under Dunbar's urging he sprang after the
gnarly man. The latter had gotten his stick out of the umbrella stand
in the vestibule. The knobby upper end went whoowh past the
assistant's nose. The assistant jumped back and fell over one of the
casualties. The front door slammed, and there was a deep roar of
"Taxi!"
"Come on!" shrieked Dunbar. "Get the ambulance outl"

James Robinette sat in his office on the third floor of a seedy
old office building in the West Fifties, thinking the thoughts that
lawyers do in moments of relaxation.
He wondered about that damn queer client, that circus freak or
whatever he was, who had been in a couple of days before with his
manager. A barrel-bodied man who looked like a halfwit and talked in
a funny slow drawl. Though there had been nothing halfwitted about
the acute way he had gone over those clauses. You'd think the damn
contract had been for building a subway system.
There was a pounding of large feet in the corridor, a startled
protest from Miss Spevak in the outer office, and the strange
customer was before Robinette's desk, breathing hard.
"I'm Gafiney," he growled between gasps. "Remember me? I
think they followed me down here. They'll be up any minute. I want
your help."
"They? Who's they?" Robinette winced at the impact of that
damned perfume.
The gnarly man launched into his misfortunes. He was going well
when there were more protests from Miss Spevak, and Dr. Dunbar and
four assistants burst into the office.
"He's ours," said Dunbar, his glasses agleam.
"He's an ape-man," said the assistant with the black eye.
"He's a dangerous lunatic," said the assistant with the cut
lip.
"We've come to take him away," said the assistant with the torn
pants.
The gnarly man spread his feet and gripped his stick like a
baseball bat.
Robinette opened a desk drawer and got out a large pistol. "One
move toward him and I'll use this. The use of extreme violence is
justified to prevent commission of a felony, to wit, kidnapping."
The five men backed up a little. Dunbar said, "This isn't
kidnapping. You can only kidnap a person, you know. He isn't a human
being, and I can prove it."
The assistant with the black eye snickered. "If he wants
protection, he better see a game warden instead of a lawyer."
"Maybe that's what you think," said Robinette. "You aren't a
lawyer. According to the law he's human. Even corporations, idiots,
and unborn children are legally persons, and he's a damn sight more
human than they are."
"Then he's a dangerous lunatic," said Dunbar.