"Murray Leinster - The Pirates of Zan" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

but it did not fall. More charges poured into it. It hung motionless halfway up the wall of the embassy."
Movements began in the darkness. Men appeared, talking in low tones and straining their eyes toward the now
motion-less figure. They gathered underneath it. One went off at a run, carrying a message. Someone of authority
arrived, panting. There was more low-toned argument. More and still more men appeared. There were forty or fifty
figures at the base of the wall.
One of those figures began to climb the rope hand over hand. He reached the motionless object. He swore in a
shocked voice. He was shushed from below. He let the figure drop. It made no sound when it landed.
Then there was a rushing, as the guards about the em-bassy went furiously back to their proper posts to keep
anybody from slipping out. The two men who remained swore bitterly over a dummy made of old clothes and pil-lows.
Hoddan was then some blocks away. He suffered painful doubt about the note ostensibly from Nedda. The guards
about the embassy would have tried to catch him in any case, but it did seem very plausible that the note had been
sent him to get him to try to climb down the wall. On the other hand, a false descent of a palpably dummy-like dummy
had been plausible too. He'd drawn all the guards to one
spot by his seeming doubt and by testing out their vigilance with a dummy. The only thing improbable in his behavior
had been that after testing their vigilance with a dummy, he'd made use of it.
A fair distance away, he turned sedately into a narrow lane between buildings. This paralleled another lane serving
the home of a girl friend of Nedda's. The note had named the garden behind that other girl's home as a rendezvous. But
Hoddan was not going to that garden. He wanted to make sure. If the cops had forged the note . . .
He judged his position carefully. If he climbed this tree . . . kind of the city-planners of Walden to use trees so
lavishly . . . if he climbed this tree he could look into the garden where Nedda, in theory, waited in tears. He climbed it.
He sat astride a thick limb and considered further. Presently he brought out his wave projector. There was deepest
darkness hereabouts. Trees and shrubbery were blacker than their surroundings. But there was reason for suspicion.
Neither in the house of Nedda's girl friend, nor in the nearer house between, was there a single lighted window.
Hoddan adjusted the wave guide and pressed the stud of his instrument. He pointed it carefully into the nearer
garden.
A man grunted in a surprised tone. There was a stirring. A man swore. The words deemed inappropriate to a citizen
merely taking a breath of evening air.
Hoddan frowned. The note from Nedda seemed to have been a forgery. To make sure, he readjusted the wave guide
to project a thin but fan-shaped beam. He aimed again. Pain-stakingly, he traversed the area in which men would have
been posted to jump him. If Nedda^were there, she would feel no effect. If police lay in wait, they would notice at
once.
They did. A man howled. Two men yelled together. Some-body bellowed. Somebody squealed. Someone in charge
of the flares made ready to give light for the police was so startled by a strange sensation that he jerked the cord. An
immense, cold-white brilliance appeared. The garden where Nedda definitely was not present became bathed in
incandescence. Light spilled over the wall of one garden
into the next and disclosed a squirming mass of police in the nearer garden also. Some of them leaped wildly and
un-gracefully while clawing behind them. Some stood still and struggled desperately to accomplish something to their
rear, while others gazed blankly at them until Hoddan swung his instrument their way, also.
A man tore off his pants and struggled over the wall to get away from something intolerable. Others imitated him.
Some removed their trousers before they fled, but others tried to get them off while fleeing! The latter did not fare too
well. Mostly they stumbled and other men fell over them.
 Hoddan let the confusion mount past any unscrambling, and then slid down the tree and joined in the rush. With
the glare in the air behind him, he only feigned to stumble over one figure after another. Once he grunted as he
scorched his own fingers. But he came out of the lane with a dozen stun-pistols, mostly uncomfortably warm, as
trophies of the ambush.
As they cooled off he stowed them away in his belt and pockets, strolling away down the tree-lined street. Behind
him, cops realized their trouserless condition and appealed plaintively to householders to notify headquarters of their
state.
Hoddan did not feel particularly disillusioned, somehow. It occurred to him, even, that this particular event was
likely to help him get off of Walden. If he was to leave against the cops' will, he needed to have them at less than top