"Robert Goulart - Gadget Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Robert)

"This isn't the Republic," said Marsloff. "He always comes out of it. He doesn't favor anybody tinkering with him when he's having one of his comas. I'll leave him here in the shack, under a quilt, for this haul. You watch him a little, Hildy?"
"If you like."
Marsloff studied the westering sun. "We'll leave in a half hour. How far south?"
"San Emanuel," said Hecker. The sunlight wasn't bothering him as much now.
"You know the Kendrys, then." Marsloff grinned. "Percher smuggled in some beer from the Tijuana Enclave, real Mexican beer. It's warm because he's been using the ice machine on himself. Wait here and I'll get us a couple bottles. We can cool them off in the ocean." He patted Hecker and the girl on their backs and climbed over fallen wood and plaster into the remnants of the seashore cafe.
CHAPTER 3
The hanging sign that caught the night wind said GIACOMO OF SAN EMANUEL on it. The sign flapped over the doorway of a building that was gone. There were only traces of a collapsed wharf out this close to the ocean now, fragments of restaurants and shops. It was his contact point, and Hecker stood there on a firm section of wharf, hearing nothing except the dark water moving across the cluttered sand below the pilings. There were mounds of seashells dotting this section of San Emanuel beach, twists of dead seaweed. The wind carried what looked like a tatter of red-checkered tablecloth up above Hecker's head, and the cloth fought and twisted, fluttering free and fading into the darkness among the fallen timbers and planking. He thought of the girl who had tried to reach him in the Rehabilitation Tower.
"See the card. Let's see the card," said a boy's voice.
Hecker carefully turned. "What card?"
The boy was too small for his age. He seemed to be about fifteen and was barely five feet tall. His legs were thin and subtly twisted, and his arms were thin, too, and bent in wrong ways. He was holding a big shaggy cat in his arms, close to his bare chest. "I'm a younger brother," he told Hecker. "An adopted brother, actually. I'm Kendry, though." The cat was limp but awake. It lolled comfortably, watching Hecker with its round yellow-green eyes.
"Tell me the cat's name," said Hecker.
"Burrwick," the boy said, "if you have to have the countersign crap. Now let's see the card. Fetch it out slowly or you'll feel some steel in your fat ribs."
"I look fat to you?" Hecker drew out the I.D. packet located the card with a gull drawn on it in pale-blue writing fluid.
The boy took the card, held it near his face. "Everybody seems fat. I hid from the soldiers too long, missed out on too many meals. They call that malnutrition, you know, all that business with vitamins and minerals. I read up on it all but haven't been able to change myself much so far."
"Don't be discouraged," said Hecker. "It takes patience. Can you tell me who sent you to meet me?"
"Not allowed to." The cat mewed once, tapped on the boy's narrow chest. "I'm to guide you to a conclave. A family gathering mostly, a Kendry thing. Be hundreds there, Kendrys and other of the guerrillas. Though some of the real good underground fighters don't go for these kind of festivities. Guerrillas grew out of the Kendry clan. Kendrys been pouring into this part of California since long time before everything fell apart. You're to palm yourself off as a cousin by marriage to old Mace Kendry. Use your real name, or whatever name you're traveling under. You married Mace's second oldest daughter, Reesie. They were both ridden down by the R.S.C. Army, are dead now. You been in a solitary cell down in San Pedro Sector since shortly after you got married two years ago. You were let out on the Junta's last birthday amnesty two years ago. You got this card - here, take it back- from Mace one time, and you heard about tonight's gathering in a bar in Venice named Uncle Avram's. Can you remember all this crap?"
"Most of it."
"Better get it all straight. Mace, in case somebody asks, had his left arm missing from just below the elbow due to a Police Corps blaster. Reesie was a tall girl, big-boned with bad front teeth. Okay-looking, but too meaty." The boy rubbed the cat's stomach. "With a couple hundred at least Kendrys together, there's likely to be some want to kill you for the sport. If you give them the added inspiration of lying and stumbling in your yarn, you'll surely feel steel from several directions."
"Thanks," said Hecker. "What's your name?"
"It isn't part of the password crap." The boy beckoned Hecker to follow him.
Walking away from the fallen wharf, Hecker said, "I wanted to know just for myself."
"Jack," said the boy.
"Jack."
"Know where I got that name?"
"No." They turned onto a street that wound between still-standing but long-vacant shops and hotels. The municipal trees had grown wild, and there was a thick tangle of branches and leaves overhead.
"Off that sign back there. Giacomo. That's Jack, more or less, in Italian. I like it down there, down by the water. Especially at night. Have you ever heard of people like that?"
"Sure, Jack. Many."
"Most Kendrys don't figure so."
"But you do," said Hecker. "Can you tell me, by the way, who's going to contact me at this family gathering?"
"Not that either. It will happen, don't fret." They walked two blocks higher, and then the cat yowled, its hair stood up, and its tail went thick and erect. "Getting close."
The cat yowled again, twisted and jumped to Jack's shoulders and then off into the night. "He doesn't much like Kendrys?" remarked Hecker.
"They're good people, but not much given to gentleness." The thin boy pointed at a rusted and twisted hurricane fence across the street. They were at the rear of a defunct public school complex, and the school gymnasium was bright with light and noise. "Gate's fallen in. Go on through and down to the gym. Tell your story. Luck to you. I'm no partygoer."
"Okay. Thanks, Jack."
"You have a name?"
"James Xavier Hecker."

Gadget Man

"Xavier part is good. I might assimilate that sometime. Good-by." He drifted back and away into the dark beneath the trees, and Hecker headed for the loud, shining gymnasium.
***
A big woman in a sleeveless leather dress handed Hecker a second piece of fried chicken. "Look at the way she carries herself," she shouted. "Smug, provocative."
"A constant worry to her father," shouted the graying woman on Hecker's left. "Guerrilla warfare is hard enough without trying to keep tags on a snooty daughter with a mind of her own." She grabbed an avocado off the abundant banquet table, split it with a knife sheathed on her dappled thigh. She popped out the big egglike seed and passed half the avocado to Hecker. "Eat this, Cousin Jim. You're mighty underweight."
"Just look at her," shouted the big woman. "Straight as a rail and no flesh to speak of. Are they partial to skinny women in your neck of the Republic, Cousin Jimmy?"
Before Hecker could reply, one of the Kendry boys grabbed him away from the food corner of the ramshackle gymnasium and pulled him through half of the several hundred people jammed together on the yellow flooring. "Game, Cousin Jim," he shouted. A six-foot-tall man, a shade over thirty, in cut-down noga suit, his hair long in ringlets. "We're going to play pumpkin ball."
"Okay by me," Hecker said.
"Bet your ass," shouted the Kendry boy. "I'm Rollo."
"Good to know you, Cousin Rollo."
"Second Cousin," said Rollo. "Eat up that avocado and hunk of chicken and we'll get going. See the basket up there?"
Hecker tilted his head back. Up high in the smoke and haze the old gymnasium basketball goal still hung. "That I do, Second Cousin Rollo."
"The object of this game is to kick the pumpkin up through there. Fun for all concerned." He whacked Hecker and sent him into a circle of eight Kendry boys. Three fat orange pumpkins were huddled in the circle center. "Cousin Jim gets first kick."