"Harry Harrison - SSR 02 - The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

crunch she was still the old Angelina. I sighed and mounted the stairs with
leaden feet.
And I felt even more of an unthinking fiend when I saw that she was
crying. "Jim, you don't love me!" A classic gambit since the first woman in
the garden, but still unanswerable.
"I do," I protested, and I meant it. "But, it's just . . . reflex. Or
something like that. I love you, but marriage is, well, like going to prison.
And in all my crooked years I have never been sent up."
"It is liberation, not captivity," she said and did things with her makeup
that removed the ravages of the tears. I noticed for the first time that she
had white lipstick on to match her white dress and a little white lacy kind of
thing in her hair.
"This is just like going swimming in cold water," she said, standing and
patting my cheek. "Get it over with quickly so you won't feel it. Now roll
down your pants and put those shoes on."
I did, but when I straightened up to answer this last fatuous argument I
saw that the door had opened and that a Marriage Master and his two witnesses
were standing in the next room. She took my arm, gently, I'll say that for
her, and at the same time the recorded strains of the mighty organ filled the
air. She tugged at my elbow. I resisted for a moment, then lurched forward as
a gray mist seemed to fall over my eyes.
 When the darkness lifted the organ was bloating its dying notes, the door
was closing behind the drafting backs and Angelina stopped admiring her ring-
decorated finger long enough to raise her lips to mine. I had barely enough
strength of will left to kiss her first before I groaned.
There were a number of bottles on the sideboard and my twitching fingers
stumbled through them to unerringly find a knobby flask of Syrian Panther
Sweat, a potent beverage with such hideous aftereffects that its sale is
forbidden on most civilized worlds. A large tumbler of this was most
efficacious, I could feel it doing me harm, and I poured a second one. While I
was doing this and immersed in my numbed thoughts a period of time must have
passed because Angelina--my Angelina (suppressed groan)--now stood before me
dressed in slacks and sweater with our bags packed and waiting at her side.
Tie glass was plucked from my fingers.
"Enough private whoopee," she said, not unkindly. "We'll celebrate tonight
but right now we have to move. The marriage record will be filed at any moment
and when our names hit the computer it's going to light up like a knocking
shop on payday. By now the police will have tied us in to most of the crimes
of the past two months and will come slavering and baying after us."
"Silence," I ordered, swaying to my feet. "The image is a familiar one.
Get the car and we will leave."
I offered to help with the bags but by the time I communicated this
information she was halfway down the stairs with them. With this encouragement
I navigated the hazard and reached the door. The car was outside humming with
unleashed power, the side door open and Angelina at the wheel tapping her foot
with equally unleashed impatience. As I stumbled into it the first tentacles
of reality penetrated my numbed cortex. This car, like all otter ground cars
on Kamata, was steam powered and the steam was generated by the combustion of
a specie of peat bricks fed to the furnace by an ingenious and unnecessarily
complicated device. It took at least a half an hour to raise steam to get