"Keith Laumer - Future Imperfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

light over the tables, the potted palms, the couples at the tables.
Off to the north you could see a dull glow in the skyтАФa reflection from the red-hot lava that
was building a new mountain range across Georgia. The surface of the Gulf was a little odd too.
The normal wave pattern was disturbed by an overlay of ripples set up by the constant minor
trembling of the sea bottom. But the band murmured of love and the diners smiled and lifted glasses
and to hell with tomorrow.
***
After a nice dinner of fresh scampi and Honduras shrimp accented with an Anjou ros├й, I went
down to the pleasure rooms on the third floor. Anzio was there, wearing his pale lavender tux and
overlooking the tables with his version of a look of benign efficiencyтАФan expression like Caesar's
favorite executioner picking out his next client.
"Howzit, Mal," he checked me over with his quick glance that could estimate the size of a
bankroll to the last half cee. "Care to try your luck tonight?"
"Maybe later, Sal," I told him. "Who's in town?"
He reeled off a roster of familiar ne'er-do-wells and the parasites who preyed off them. I found
my attention wandering. It was a nice night, a nice crowd, but something was worrying me. I kept
remembering the man with the broken legs, and the silent, not overly bright boys who had come
gunning for himтАФand for me. Three of them. All dead. Killed by me, a peaceful man who'd never
fired a shot in anger until yesterday. But what else could I have done? They were out to killтАФand I
had beaten them to the prize. It was that simple. And yet it was not simple at all.
" . . . . people in town," Sal was saying. "Some strange cats, true, but rolled, Mal, rolled."
"Who's that fellow?" A slim chap was moving past in black tails and white tie, almost but not
quite conservative enough to look a little odd in the fashionable crowd.
"Huh? I dunno." Sal lifted his chin in a gesture of dismissal. "One of those kooks in here for
this convention, I guess."
"What convention?" I did not know quite what it was about the man's look that bothered me.
He was bland-faced, fortyish, well groomed, quiet, wearing about as much expression as an omelet.
"This noomismatics bunch, or whatever you call it. Got the twenty-eighth and twenty-ninth
floors. Biggest bunch of creeps you ever saw, if you ask me. No action there, Mal."
"Numismatics, huh?" Coin collectors. I had a coin upstairsтАФa heavy gold coin, handed me by
a dying man with as wild a tale as ever curled a kid's hair at bedtime. He had wanted me to take itтАФ
somewhere, tell someone his story. Some story. I would wind up either kicked down a couple of
flights of official stairs, or locked up until the birdies stopped singing in my ears. Mammoths under
ice. Cave men in fancy pants, packing ray guns. The poor fellow had been raving, blowing his top
in his final delirium, that was all. Nothing for me to get emotional about. The coin was probably a
novelty piece, solid lead with a gold wash, issued to commemorate a tie for third in basketball
scored by good old Pawtucket High in the hot season of '87.
And then again, maybe not.
Numismatics. They would know about coins. It would not take ten minutes to show it to one of
them, get an opinion. That would settle the question once and for all, and leave me to get on
undisturbed with the important business of providing for the needs of one Malcome Irish, late of the
U.S. Navy and later still of the army of the unemployed, a healthy eater with a burning desire to
experience the best his era had to offerтАФsuch as it wasтАФwith the least possible discomfort.
"Thanks, Sal," I said, and headed for the elevators.
***
 The twenty-eighth floor was silent, somber under rose-toned glare strips set in the ceiling in a
geometric pattern. Through wide double glass doors at the end of the corridor I could see a bright
room where people stood in the static poses of cocktail-party conversation. I went along the pale,
immaculate carpet, pushed through into a dull mutter of talk. Faces turned my wayтАФbland,
ordinary faces, calm to the point of boredom. A waiter eased over, offered a small tray of sweet-