"Dean Ing - Devil You Don't Know" - читать интересную книгу автора (Ing Dean)

Tucking his slight paunch under the steering wheel, Maffei whirred them toward the automatic gate. It slid
aside, then back, as they emerged onto the highway. Val Clarke slumped in her seat with a lip-blubbering
parody of released tension. "Oh, come on, Val, it can't be that bad," Maffei smirked.

"Not for you it can't. It isn't your screwed-up implants, pal, you try running an inside surveillance with an
intermittent transceiver short sometime and I'll patronize you."

He glanced from the road to her, reached out to her tiny skull and gently stroked behind her ear. "No
swelling. If it were a mastoid infection you'd know it for sure."

The girl shrugged upward in her seat, barely able to see over the battery cowl ahead. "I'll survive. Well,
what do you make of Nodaway Retreat?"

"Typical ultraconservative ripoff," he mused, barely audible over the hum and tire noise. "From your
reports I make it one staff member per twenty patients, minimal life-support for everyone concerned
except for the up-front crew; one honest-to-God R.N. and a pair of general practitioners who look in
once a month from Des Moines to trade sedatives for fees."

"I've seen worse. Remember Ohio?"

Maffei nodded sagely. Val Clarke had scarcely been admitted when her transmissions began to read like
a bedlam litany. Rickettsia and plain starvation, a "bad ward" where three children of normal intelligence
were chained, and a nightly victimization of youthful male patients by the staff. "That's what my survey is
about; to change all that. It was the worst I ever saw," he admitted.

Val flicked him a quick glance, but Maffei intended no sarcasm. He had seen two staff members wearing
masks of outraged innocence, and strap marks on Val's thin calves after the general warrant had been
servedтАФ really more raid than service, brought on by Val's moment-to-moment account via her
minuscule implanted transceiver. In the space of thirty-six hours Val had seen two compound femur
fractures on a girl who had jumped from her high window, and a gang assault of one profoundly retarded
child by besmocked thugs. The worst Maffei had seen in Ohio was not precisely the worst Val Clarke
had seen; but then, Maffei bore no stigmata of retardation.

It was Valerie Clarke's tragedy to have been born with an autosomal dominant inheritance which was
instantly diagnosed as mental retardation. The astonishing width between her eyes had a name of its own:
hyper-telorism. It explained nothing except that Val's great brown orbs were set a trifle too far apart to
please a society which, paradoxically, distrusted eyes set too close together. Her lustrous roan hair
normally covered a skull which, from its small size, also had a special stigma with label attached:
microcephaly. Her ears flared a bit, particularly noticeable now that her hair was shorn, and at
twenty-two, Val Clarke passed for twelve even without her training bra.

Any competent specialist could adjust to the fact that Val's intelligence was normal, her motivation
superbтАФa recipe for "genius." The unadjusted expectation was something else again. Val, an early victim
of maldiagnosis and parental rejection, knew the signs of a good sanitarium from the inside because she
had experienced enough bad ones in childhood.

When Val was thirteen, a supicious young intern named Chris Maffei taught her basic algebra and the
scatology of three foreign languages to prove his point. After that, her schooling was more formal if not
exactly conventional. Any girl who patterned herself after Chris Maffei could junk the word "convention"