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

"Maybe," said Hecker. "Same usually likes to work alone or with a small complement of men. Tactics he prefers to numbers."
Jane turned, her cheeks hollowing and her eyes narrowing. She caught her father's attention in the crowd and gave him a series of unobtrusive hand signals. "We worked this sign language out when I was a kid. Okay, come this way. There's an emergency exit through that locker room. I doubt he'll try to round up the whole clan. Dad and the boys can fight out of here should they have to." She walked casually toward an archway marked BOYS' LOCKER ROOMS.
Hecker came with her, and in five minutes they were outside in the night. On a wooded hillside. Suddenly below them a Police Corps hopper, bright-lit and lemon-yellow, came dropping down out of the dark above the gym. Hand torches popped on in the weedy playing fields surrounding the gym. Two dozen at least, illuminating -orange tunic sleeves and lime-green trouser legs.
"A raid," said Jane. She hesitated, then pulled Hecker away with her. "Dad can handle this. We'll go wait in our camp."
From behind a white pine a few yards in front of them, a glow of light appeared, flickering on an aluminum pistol. "No one to leave this area now," spoke a Police Corps man.
"It's okay," said Hecker, stepping in the direction of the bobbing hand light. "I'm with the..." The blaster crackled before he finished, and his trouser leg caught fire.
Another blaster sizzled from behind him. The P.C. man's hand flamed in the dark, went black. The aluminum pistol pinwheeled and was lost in the brush. Jane was next to the man as he tottered toward falling. She struck him twice at the base of the skull, and he fell fast and was still.
"How are you?" asked Jane. She looked not at Hecker but at the woods, listening. "No more P.C. men around here, it seems."
Hecker had slapped the flames out and found beneath the fresh-burnt hole in his pants that his leg was barely scorched. "Nothing. I'm fine. You?"
"Yes."
"He didn't give me time to identify myself."
"Often happens. Come on."
"Where?"
"I told you. To our camp. You can hide out with us for a little."
"I don't have to hide out."
"No, but I suggest we get the hell away from here. Now and fast."
Hecker reflected a second. Then agreed.
CHAPTER 4
Out in center field Hecker paced in a small half-circle, sideways, his big knurly hands on his knees. The sun was straight above, and the rolling field glared green. Hecker watched the big Kendry up at bat and also scanned the area for some sight of Jane. The girl had slipped out of this temporary camp sometime after breakfast. While searching for her, wanting more information on Gadget Man, Hecker had been recruited by Milo and Rollo Kendry to play softball.
The batter hit. The ball came spinning out toward, Hecker, but continued on over his head. Hecker trotted after the ball. Beyond this overgrown picnic ground was a wide path and then a synthetic moat. On the other side of the moat rose a stucco mountain, two stories high. A nearly obliterated wooden sign was hanging tentatively to the wrought-iron fence guarding the moat. WELLES PARK ZOO/MONKEY ISLAND. The softball smacked the sign, dislodging it, and then bounced over the moat and came to rest on the island.
Hecker pulled up short of the low rusty ironwork. He knuckled at his shaggy mustache, squinted one eye at the ball. A naked fat girl came out of one of the monkey caves and waved at him with wiggling fingers. "Woowee," she inquired, "isn't it too hot for baseball, cousin?"
"Not for the real aficionado," replied Hecker. "Can you toss me the ball?"
"I'm clumsy in athletics," said the plump girl. She jabbed a thumb in the direction of the game. "Indoor sports for me, if you get my drift." She bent, jiggling, and grabbed up the softball. "We, me and some of my distant boy relatives, are in here having a gang-bang. Keeps you out of the sun on these woowee kind of sultry days."
She was about to toss the ball when a large Kendry boy, clad in the lower half of a suit of thermal underwear, popped out of the murky cave. He whacked the naked girl on her freckled buttocks, and she and the ball rolled down the side of the monkey island and into the moat. Muddy water and dry leaves splashed high. "Woowee," said the Kendry boy, his shoulder-length hair waving. "Now that's humor." He grinned across at Hecker. "There are a lot of humorless bastards in the Republic, cousin."
Hecker said, "No wonder you're hot. That's winter underwear."
The giant boy inserted a thumb under the waistband of the buff-colored underwear. "No, it's a fetish. I can't do nothing without I wear these."
A chubby middle-aged man, bald and blackbeared, came from the cave bent low. "You dumb, creepy bastard," he said. "You go and start playing jokes before I even took my second turn."
"Woowee," said the underwear-clad Kendry. He clutched the complaining man by the beard and pinwheeled him into the murky water. "Oh, that's funnier than the first."
Hecker nodded at the scummy moat water where the bearded man was dog-paddling. "She hasn't come up yet."
"Alice likes to swim underwater. See, this here moat connects with the alligator house over there. Whenever we camp here, Alice does this. Swims underwater over into there and surfaces on the alligator promenade."
"You've thrown her in the moat before?"
"A good joke bears repeating, cousin" He shook his head. "I'm afraid, though, you're not going to find that baseball."
Hecker agreed and jogged back to the field of play. The game had not resumed. Instead, Milo and Rollo were on the pitcher's mound together, battling with baseball bats.
"Tell me I don't know a spit ball, you poor ninny," Milo was growling when Hecker came into hearing range. "I'll smash your unsportsmanlike coco in."
"I'm no ninny, you fat-ass rube," said Rollo, his ringlets tossing. Their bats met with a tremendous clack, and both men quivered. "I've read up on all the major sports. Read in books, you ill-read horsebutt."
Hecker walked on by and across the field and off. There were nearly a hundred guerrillas camped here in this abandoned and unsecured public zoo. Hecker crossed a weathered wood bridge, searching again for Jane. As he was passing a partially collapsed merry-go-round, a long, lean man hailed him: "Hey, Hecker."
Hecker joined the man in the fragments of shade that fell from the merry-go-round's glass-and-iron roof. He'd been introduced to him at breakfast. "Hello. You're Hash Sontag. No relation to the Kendrys."
"Right," said Hash. He put two fingers in the breast pocket of his chambray tunic and drew out a little plyo sack. "You're looking for Jane."
"Yes. Seen her?"
"She's worried about Jack, the kid. He was supposed to join us here." Hash shook some flakes out of the sack and into a cigarette paper he'd fished from the back pocket of his tan trousers. "She cut back to see if she could find him. Might be he got picked up in that raid last night. About six others missing, but we don't have word yet on whether they're captured."
"By herself, she went?"
Hash's slate-gray eyes flicked up from their concentration on rolling his cigarette. "Jane needs to be by herself sometimes." Licking the cigarette to seal it, he said, "This is some of that synthetic marijuana they're turning out in the Canal Zone kibbutz. Sort of mild. I know who you are, so you can relax."
Hecker took a back step. "Oh?"
"As was mentioned, I'm not a Kendry," said Hash. He had his back against a poled wooden horse. "Less of them and more people like yourself is what we need. Otherwise, it's always going to be horseplay and the Junta. Not a new government."
"I'm not a recruit."
Hash lit his cigarette and inhaled. He grinned. "You're Sergeant James Xavier Hecker with the Social Wing of the Police Corps. But you're still more on our side than you are on the Junta's."
Hecker said, "Don't expect too much. I'm on an assignment, and it means cooperating. At the end of it I'll go back." He gestured with one rough hand at the tree-thick hills surrounding this small valley. "I'm part of out there."
"At the moment," said Hash. "When Jane suggested getting help from somebody in the Social Wing, I agreed with her. This Gadget Man business will probably need the Police Corps to stop it. We don't have the equipment and facilities. So I figure it's okay to let you help us investigate."
Hecker rubbed at one of the healing cuts on his face. "What do you know about Gadget Man?"
"Only what Jane does." Hash's gray eyes flicked up again. "She's coming down through the trees now. Alone, not with Jack." He inhaled, grinned, drifted away around the far side of the broken-down merry-go-round.