"Murder In The Solid State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mccarthy Wil)

Spring-loaded, readily concealable in an ejector that strapped to the forearm, the drop foil was fashioned from ordinary plastic and could therefore pass through the security detectors that marked the entrances of most public buildings. But drop foils were sharp, and expensive, and (he'd heard) very intimidating to the average street thug, who had no interest in getting poked full of holes for the contents of one man's wallet.
Drop foils were illegal, of course, and very much against the spirit of public helplessness the Gray Party had worked so hard to foster. They were the sort of thing snobby college kids showed off to their friends, with a swagger and a little tough talk, and not at all the sort of thing David expected to see dropping from the jacket sleeve of a puffball like Otto Vandegroot.
"I'll teach you some fucking manners," Vandegroot spat, taking another step forward and brandishing the newly sprung weapon. He'd arranged his feet into a fighting stance, drawn his left arm behind him, the hand hovering six inches off his hip. His right arm straightened, and the tip of the foil dropped until it was pointing directly at David's face, only a couple of feet away.
David felt his eyes widening, sensed his vision growing narrow, his breath growing shallow and quick. He tried to step back but found he was up against one of the buffet tables. Working on its own initiative, his left hand reached behind him and grabbed at whatever was nearest, coming forward with a load of small, soft objects, candies or berries or something. He lifted them up as if he might throw them, then thought better of it and opened his fingers. Small things pattered softly against the carpet. The room, all four and a half acres of it, had gone deathly silent.
"Professor Vandegroot, wait," Da3vid said, in what he hoped was a conciliatory tone. Shit, where was hotel security now?
"Oh. So now it's 'Professor Vandegroot' again, is it? That's good. I may just carve it into your forehead so you don't forget."
David dodged to the side, colliding with a knot of people. He felt someone thrust something into his open right hand, and then the knot gave, the people fading back, avoiding the scuffle. Vandegroot took a sliding step sideways, arranging himself in front of David once again.
David let his glance flick down for a moment, and he saw what had been placed in his hand: a little white cylinder, much like the one Vandegroot had so recently held. It was much heavier than he would have expected, much springier, much more squeezable in his hand. He squeezed it.
Instantly, the thing jerked in his grip and sprang out to its full length.
"Ha!" Vandegroot called out, seeing the three-foot plastic blade, stepping forward, and slapping it aside. "The mouse has teeth, does he?" Vandegroot's own blade lanced in and out quickly, piercing David's shirt, lightly pricking the flesh beneath it.
"Ow!" Startled, David tried to pull back again, came up hard against the buffet table again. There was nowhere to go; there was no way for him to step out of reach of Vandegroot's foil. He was struck all at once by the absurdity of the situation-here he was, twenty-five years old and striving desperately for the respectability of adulthood, yet somehow he was having a sword fight in front of all the people he most wanted to impress. And he was losing, badly!
Vandegroot lunged forward again, lithe and strong despite his bulk, his blade coming straight in toward David's heart. I have to block; I have to parry, David thought, but by the time he'd brought his blade around, Vandegroot had pricked him again and stepped back. David didn't know how to parry. David didn't know how to fence at all.
"It's a difficult lesson," Vandegroot said, and David saw the bastard wasn't even breathing hard. "It's a painful-"
Vandegroot lunged forward again, his front leg moving out, his body sliding down and forward above it. Arm projecting straight out from the shoulder, elbow locked. The extended arm is both a target and a lever, said the voice of David's Street Defense instructor, and suddenly David knew exactly what to do.
His right arm was forward, the elbow up, the sword pointing vertically downward in his grip. A useless, ludicrous pose, but now he rotated the blade upward with a vicious, snapping gesture that brought it around hard against Otto Vandegroot's drop foil. The two swords, crossing with a plastic CLACK, were jerked to the right, so that Vandegroot's sword now pointed off past David's shoulder.
Without pausing, David stepped forward with his left foot, pivoting at the waist and bringing his left hand forward as he did so. His fingers closed around the wrist of Otto's sword hand. His right hand disengaged the sword, came up and around in a wide, graceful arc as he turned on the ball of his left foot. The movement was mechanical and yet fluid, loose, like a dance step. In half a second, David had swung around until he was back-to-back with Vandegroot, both arms extended as if in a ballet parody of crucifixion. His right hand held the sword out loosely, while his left took a tighter grip on Vandegroot's wrist. His chin was high, and for a moment he saw the astonished faces of Henry Chong and Elaine Busey, of Yeagle and Quick and the other Heavy Hitters.
But the dance had not yet finished. He stepped out and sideways with his right foot, then put his weight down on it and turned, sliding his left foot and pivoting until he faced Vandegroot once again.
This was Wrist Twist Number Three, one of the first moves they had taught him in Street Defense. David was not doing it as quickly as it should be done, but then again he was young and long of reach and he hadn't been drinking, and he could do this much better than he could fence.
Vandegroot gaped at him, looking shocked and outraged. I was ready for you, his expression seemed to say, but you didn't make the right move. What the hell are you doing? And then, comprehension dawned as David applied the pressure. Like magic, he had jerked Vandegroot off-balance and danced his wrist around until the sword pointed off in a useless direction. The position was awkward at best, and when the victim's hand was pushed and twisted in the Street Defensive way the pain was sudden and excruciating.
"Aah. Aah!" A look of alarm flashed across Otto's face. This hurt. This hurt. Good.
"Drop the sword," David said. He sounded remarkably calm, much calmer than he actually felt.
"Let. . . You're . . ."
"Drop it!"
Otto's face relaxed, and his arm relaxed in David's grip, and his hand opened, and the drop foil tumbled free, bouncing off Otto's bicep and knee on its way to the carpet. I surrender, the body language was saying. I don't know what you 're doing, but it hurts me and I would like you to please stop doing it!
But David did not back off on the pressure. Vandegroot had been all too willing to inflict pain and embarrassment on him, and he found he couldn't let that go quite so easily. He twisted a little more.
"Ow!" Vandegroot cried out with more than a hint of panic in his voice.
David sneered angrily. "On your ass, old man. It's the only way."
His eyes were locked on Vandegroot's, and understanding flashed between the two of them like a telecom signal. In order to relieve the pain, Vandegroot must bend his knees and fall backward, right onto his generous rear end. He must drop himself, quite literally, at David's feet. He knew this, and David knew that he knew it, and he saw that David knew and hated him for it. And thusly, he fell.




CHAPTER THREE

David took off his pierced, blood-specked zipper tie and threw it on the dresser even before he'd kicked the door shut. The room was bland, unwelcoming, its colors pale in the harsh lighting. White diode arrays striped across the ceiling, bright and tough and economical, drawing very little current for the illumination they gave. But there was nothing welcoming about them. Comfort was what he needed right now, but the hotel had reserved all its posh splendor for the public spaces, and this room was a place of convenience, nothing more. Actual, soul-soothing comfort was not this hotel's forte; that sort of thing came dearer than even AMFRI would shell out for.
He'd handled things badly; he knew that. Hell, the evening could hardly have turned out worse. He had no doubt that the tale would be told again and again, haunting him down the long decades of his career. Don 'tmess with Sanger. He once beat up Otto Vandegroot, you know. Yeah, broke his arm right in the middle of a cocktail party in Baltimore. David had not, in fact, broken Otto's arm, but a lot of people seemed to think that he had, and no doubt that was how the incident would be remembered.
This was not the sort of reputation David wanted, not at all, but he couldn't even work up a sense of outrage about it; he had crossed the line, and had done it knowingly. Disarming an attacker was one thing, but publicly dumping a respected scientist on his ass was something else again. Whether or not the scientist had earned such treatment (or worse) was hardly the point. David ran over and over the events in his mind, hunting for the moment of his error, the moment at which he could have chosen differently, defusing the tension and still retaining his pride. Facing down Vandegroot without pissing him off... But somehow, the moment eluded him. Each of his actions seemed ordained, inevitable, outside the realm of rational control.
Henry Chong had spoken up for him when the hotel's security guards had finally materialized. He had told them that Vandegroot started the fight, that David had had no way to escape and so had been forced to defend himself.
"I wasn't going to hurt him," Otto had shouted as the guards pulled him away. He cradled his arm and glared poison at David. "Stupid little punk. I don't respect him enough to hurt him!"
But the sword and the two dime-sized spots of blood on David's shirt had told them all they needed to know. Congratulations had followed, some of the onlookers stepping forward to clap David on the back, to praise him, to ask him if he was all right, and hey, where did he learn a trick like that? He'd answered vaguely, uncomfortable with the attention, with the juvenile gloating and bravado that lay behind it. Unlike his young colleagues, the Heavy Hitters had withdrawn, their smiles now more polite than warm. Treating him like a dog that had bristled and growled unexpectedly. Good lord, what else is this young man capable of? He understood their reaction perfectly, and it made him sad.
And then, without warning the shakes had come, a great and uncontrollable trembling in his hands and body as the meaning of the fight, the danger of it, sank in. To hell with his ruined reputation; he might have lost an eye. He and Vandegroot had been waving swords at one another. Jesus, he might have lost his life.
It took three shots of vodka to get the shaking under control, and three more to really calm him down. Even then, even now, he didn't feel the least bit drunk. He felt a little bit like crying, or like tearing the TV set off the wall and heaving it through the window to smash down among the city lights.
Instead, he threw himself down on the bed and reached for the vidphone.
Marian Fouts either was or was not his girlfriend, depending on what sort of mood she was in when you asked her. And David was or was not in love with her, depending on how determinedly she was ignoring him that day. Marian's life was, to say the least, a full one; she had been part of the cooperative effort to revive the defunct Philadelphia Bulletin, and revive it she had. It thrived now as a free, ad-supported newspaper, and her days were filled with writing and editing and investigative reporting, and with the business minutiae that she, as a major shareholder, could never quite escape.
At night she put her work firmly out of mind but had another vice to replace it: NEVERland. Networked Virtual Reality Simulations were for her like a kind of secret identity, a second life entirely distinct from the first and impinging upon it in no way. She was a "closet sorceress," one of millions, but quite good if David was to believe her stories. So at twenty-six years of age, Marian ran both a newspaper and a magic kingdom-a full plate indeed.
She answered the phone on the sixth ring, her color image appearing on the phone's screen just before her voice mail could pick up.
"Yeah?" she said, her image pushing a VR helmet up off its face with a what-the-hell-do-you-want sort of air. David had flagged the call for priority ring, else she probably would not have answered at all.
"I need to talk to you," he said.
"So talk," she replied, simply and without inflection. "I'm dying for the sound of your voice."
Perversely, this was exactly what David loved about Marian. He had the constant feeling that she'd be happier without him, without the constant distraction that he represented, and this spoke to a part of his brain in urgent tones: Be worthy of her! Hold onto her for another day! And another, and another... They had gone on like that for almost two years, now. It seemed a childish sort of relationship, and one which David kept expecting one or the other of them to outgrow. But the sex between them was very good, and anyway, David suspected he wouldn't have time for a girlfriend who actually had time for him.