"Metzger-PlanetOfDolphins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

Translation.

"Ahhhhhhh!"

Herman hit asphalt, face-first, the dry, gritty surface scraping his forehead.
He leaped up and ran, stumbling over trash cans and boxes, tripping, hitting the
brick wall, bouncing from it, and then stumbling from the alley and out onto the
street.

He collapsed.

And as he fell, he looked back into the alley. There was no whale, no
crystalline cage, no flaming crystal. It was just an alley -- a dry, dusty Vegas
alley. Reality had reasserted itself. The back of his head hit asphalt. The neon
sky and dull stars swam above him. "Another bifurcation successfully
transitted."

Neon sky and dull stars were gone. Ishmael hung over him, staring at him with
his too-large eyes and grinning with a smile full of razor-blade teeth.

"Tomorrow is safe, the future retained."

Herman blinked.

And then he leaped to his feet. "You son of a bitch!" he screamed. "The orca
almost got me!" He took a swing at ishmael's misshapen head and missed, his fist
flying through it, cutting cleanly from right to left ear, having been
translated along directions beyond normal three-dimensional space.

"You're but a player," said Ishmael.

Herman swung again, and once more his fist passed through Ishmael's head. "I'II
kill you!"

"And this play has not quite come to its inevitable conclusion."

Ishmael vanished, moving orthogonally to Herman's reality. It was only then that
Herman saw the two cops, the ones with guns drawn, the ones that he realized
were probably in search of a doughnut thief.

"On the ground!" ordered the cop on the left.

Herman stood frozen, overloaded. The transition from the killer whale and
Ishmael, to cops and pulled guns, was too abrupt. He raised up his left hand to
point toward the alley, wanting to explain about the orca and why he had run out
of the diner when he had smelled the salt water. He managed to open his mouth.

Both cops fired.

The high-voltage darts hit Herman in the chest. His unconscious body convulsed,