"HARRISON, Harry - 04 - The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You(V1.0)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

"Explanations can wait. I am here to accelerate your graduation because something not too nice has happened to your mother."

Their grins vanished on the instant and they leaned forward alertly, drinking in every word as I explained what I had seen, nodding in agreement.

"Right, then," Bolivar said, "We go stir up old Dirty Dorsky and get out of here. . ."

". . . and do something about it," James added, finishing the sentence. They did this often, many times thinking as one.

We marched. In step, at a good doubletime of 120 paces to the minute. Through the great hall and past all the skeletons in chains, up the main staircase, splashing through the water running constantly down it, and into the Head's office.

"You can't go in there," his secretary-bodyguard said, surging to his feet, 200 kilos of trained fighting flesh. We scarcely slowed and only broke step going over his unconscious body. Dorsky looked up growling when we came through the door, gun ready in his fist.

"Put it away," I told him. "It is an emergency and I have come for my sons a few days early. Would you be so kind as to give them their graduation certificates and expiration of term-served papers."

"Go to hell. No exceptions. Get out of here," he suggested.

I smiled at the unswerving gun and decided that explanation would be more fruitful than violence.

"This is a bit of an emergency. My wife, the boys' mother, was arrested this morning and taken away."

"It was due to happen. You lead undisciplined lives. Now get out."

"Listen, you dough-faced, moron-brained, military dinosaur, I came here for neither your sympathy nor malice. If this was an ordinary arrest the arrestees would have been unconscious soon after opening the door. Detectives, cops, military police, customs agents, none of those could stand before the wrath of my sweet Angelina."

"Well?" he said, puzzled, but gun barrel still ready.

"She went along quietly in order to give me time. Time that I will need. Because I checked the license plate numbers and these thugs were agents for . . ." I took a deep breath, agents for Interstellar Internal and External Revenue."

"The income tax men," be breathed and his eyes glowed redly. The gun vanished. "James diGriz, Bolivar diGriz, step forward. Accept these graduation certificates as token of your reluctant completion of all courses and of time served here. You are now alumni of Dorsky Military Boarding School and Penitentiary and I hope you will, like the other graduates, remember us with a little curse before retiring each night. I would shake your hands except my bones are getting brittle and I am laying off the hand-to-hand combat.

Go forth with your father and join him in the battle against evil and strike a blow for me as well."

That was all there was to it. A minute later we were out in the sunshine and climbing into the car. The boys left their childish possessions behind them in the school and entered the world of adult responsibility.

"They won't hurt Mom, will they?" James asked. "They won't live long if they do," Bolivar said, and I distinctly heard his teeth grinding together.

"No, of course not. Getting her release will be easy enough, as long as we can get to the records in time."

"What records?" Bolivar asked. "And why did Dirty Dorsky help so easily? That's not like him."

"It is like him because under that veneer of stupidity, violence and military sadism he is still roughly human like the rest of us. And like us, he regards the tax man as the natural enemy."

"I don't understand," James said, then grabbed the handhold as we snarled around a tight bend just a micrometer from the edge of the vertical drop.

"Unhappily you will," I told him. "Your lives have been sheltered up until now, in that you have been spending but not earning. Soon you will be earning like the rest of us and, with the arrival of your first credit, sweat of your palms and brow, the tax man will arrive as well. Swooping in ever smaller circles, screaming shrilly, until he perches on your shoulder and with yellow beak bites most of the money from your grasp."

"You sure turn a nice simile, Dad."

"It's true, it's true," I muttered, swinging into the motorway and roaring into the fast lane. "Big government means big bureaucracy which means big taxes; there seems to be no way out of it. Once you're involved in the system you are trapped, and you end by paying more and more taxes. Your mother and I have a little nest egg put aside for investing for your future. Money earned before you lads were born."