"Harry Harrison - SSR 03 - The Stainless Steel Rat Saves The " - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

unsupported, fell to the desktop.
" Whargh!" I grunted, or something equally incomprehensible. I bent to
look for bidden devices under the chair when, with a very nasty crunching
sound, the office door was broken down.
Now this was something I could understand. I whirled about, still in the
crouch, and was ready for the first man when he came through the door. The
hard edge of my hand got him in the throat, right under the gas mask, and he
gurgled and dropped. But there were plenty more behind him, all with masks and
while coals, wearing little black packs an their backs, either barefisted or
carrying improvised clubs. It was all very unusual. Weight of numbers forced
me back, but I caught one of them under the chin with my toe while a hard jab
to the solar plexus polished off another. Then I had my shoulders to the wall,
and they began to swarm over me. I smashed one of them across the back of the
neck, and he fell. And vanished halfway to the floor.
This was very interesting. The number of people in the room began to
change rapidly now as some of the men I hit snuffed out of sight. This was a
good thing that helped even the odds except for the fact that others kept
appearing out of thin air at about the same rate. I struggled to get to the
door, could not make it, then the club got me in the side of the head and
scrambled my brains nicely.
After that it was like trying to fight slow motion under water. I hit a
few more of them, but my heart wasn't really in it. They had my arms and legs
and began to drag me from the room. I writhed about a certain amount and
cursed them fluently in a half dozen languages, but all of this had just about
the results you would expect. They rushed me from the room and down the
corridor and into the waiting elevator. One of them held up a canister, and I
tried to turn my head away, but the blast of gas caught me full in the face.
It did nothing for me that I could feel, though I did get angrier. Kicking
and snapping my teeth and shouting insults. The masked men mumbled back in
what might have been irritated mumbles, which only goaded me to greater fury.
By the time we reached our destination I was ready to kill, which I normally
do not find easy to do, and certainly would have if I hadn't been strayed into
a gadgety electric chair and had electrodes fastened to my wrists and ankles.
"Tell them that Jim diGriz died like a man, you dogs!" I shouted, not
without a certain amount of slavering and foaming. A metal helmet was lowered
over my head, and just before it covered my face I managed to call out, "Up
the Special Corps! And up your--"
Darkness descended, and I was aware that death or electrocution or brain
destruction or worse was imminent.
Nothing happened, and the helmet was raised again, and one of the
attackers gave me another shot in the face from a canister, and I felt the
overwhelming anger draining away as fast as it had arrived. I blinked a bit at
this and saw that they were freeing my arms and legs. I also saw that most of
them had their masks off now and were recognizable as the Corps technicians
and scientists who usually puttered about this lab.
"Someone wouldn't like to tell me just what the hell is going on, would
they?"
"Let me fix this first," one of them said, a gray-haired man with
buckteeth like old yellowed gravestones caught between his lips. He hung one
of the black boxes from my shoulder and pulled a length of wire from it that