"Ron Goulart - A Talent For The Invisible" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

"Be better if I let the boss explain." He poked two cocoa fingers into the
finger holes in his side and the plate-size phone screen in his chest came
alive.
A little rumpled frazzled man of fifty showed on the picture screen. He
was wrapped in a tacky synth-fur bathrobe, slumped in the breakfast nook
of his Wild Talents Division office. He blinked at Conger with his faded
little eyes. "Yark," he said. "Why are you bouncing up and down, Jake?"
"I'm running," answered Conger. "Why are you spinning around and
around?"
Blinking again Geer, the WTD boss, replied, "I had my breakfast nook
designed to rotate so I'd always be facing a sunny window, remember?" He
made a yawning face, biting at air. "The dingus is a little out of whack and
keeps mistaking any bright object for the sun. Right now it's fascinated
with the silver pendulum on my wall clock across the office."
 Nodding, Conger asked, "Who's coming back to life?"
Geer ripped plyofilm off a self-heating waffleburger. "People who are
supposed to be dead."
"Speaking of that," said Conger. "Didn't you read the Surgeon General's
report on waffleburgers?"
"What's that yoohoo computer know about what it takes to wake me up
in the morning," said the rumpled Geer as he bit into his breakfast
sandwich. "Especially when I sleep in the office. I suppose I should give up
soyjava, too?"
"It won't kill you," said Conger. "What dead people?"
Geer sipped his cup of soyjava with an exaggerated slurp. The rotation
of his circular nook floor caused some of the grey-brown liquid to splash
up against his sunken cheeks. "This is a spooky one, Jake." He took
another slurp of the imitation coffee. "Even for the Wild Talents Division,
where everything tends to be spooky, this is extra odd. These dead people
seem to be coming back to life." He set aside his waffleburger to pick up a
tri-op photo. "You know who this yoohoo is?"
"It's hard to recognize him with syrup on his face."
Geer squinted at the portrait, moistened his thumb and wiped at it. "I
wish this was my layoff month. I'm tired of these business breakfasts. I've
already had a go-round with Agent Katzman this morning. He's the one
with the ability to walk through walls. Now he's developed a quirk."
"A quirk?" The lemon-yellow ramp made a sharp turn around the side
of a blue pseudoconcrete tower and Conger slowed a little.
"Lately he only gets halfway through the walls and then gets stuck," said
Geer. "He says it's because he has domestic troubles."
Conger leaned his head closer to the screen on the running robot's
chest. "That's Colonel Macaco Cavala, isn't it?"
"Who?"
"In the photo."
Geer scowled at the tri-op picture he was holding up. "Yes. Colonel
Macaco Cavala, the late Portuguese strongman."
"He's the guy who was going to overthrow the current dictator of
Portugal," said Conger.
"Yeah, that's why they killed him last month," said Geer, letting the
photo drop. It landed in his soyjava saucer.