"Perry, Steve - OtherToys" - читать интересную книгу автора (Perry Steven)

sets in.

If he'd been on the beat, dealing with the scum of the city, he would have been
too busy writing the news to read it. He was a good reporter, if getting long in
the tooth at forty-five to still be on the cop shop; still, good reporter or
not, he got most of his news when he was working from the tube. Dan Rather.
Peter Jennings. Even Tom Brokaw, when the cable sometimes went out and he had to
tune the damned set manually.

Cartas leaned back in the rickety cane-bottomed chair that had belonged to his
grandmother. The wood was old, the screws had pulled halfway out on one side,
the caning was stretched by too many fat asses over too many years. He reached
for the cup of coffee and sipped at it, but it had gone cold, the cream giving
it a sickly and almost rancid paleness. He put the cup down and looked at the
piece again. It didn't mean anything, didn't mean anything at all. He was on
vacation. He was forty-five, bald, thirty-five pounds overweight and sitting
alone in his matchbox of a kitchen in his rented house, drinking too much
coffee. Who would have ever thought it would be like this? He'd had such big
plans, once upon a time. A long time ago. It had gone south somewhere along the
way, one day he'd looked up and half his life was over. He'd lost it somewhere
and damned if he knew where. Or when.

So, some scientists found some bones, big fucking deal. It didn't matter.

Peter Lipton wished he had a gun. Better, one of his more Neanderthal
football-playing students with a machine gun, standing outside the cave, ready
to blast anybody who got too close.

"Professor?"

Lipton pulled himself away from the fantasy. Might as well wish for the
royalties to Jean Auel's next novel, while he was at it. He looked at the
speaker, his post-doc assistant, a long-haired boy of twenty-six who bore the
rather absurd name of "Ocean Cummings." Most of the time he went by O.C. His
parents had apparently been hippies in the sixties and inflicted much upon him
as a result of their rather solipsistic new age cant. Some of it must have
stuck, for he wore his hair in a long braid that nearly reached to the middle of
his upper back.

"We've found another one," O.C. said.

He held his hands out as might a man offering gifts to a king.

Lipton had seen sixty-eight of the things by now, they had that many whole ones,
plus fragments of maybe fifty others, but each time seemed like a miracle. It
was greenish, almost a jade color, veined with dark red twisted lines just below
the surface. This particular specimen was the size of a saucer, roundish but
irregularly so, perhaps the thickness of a fifty-cent piece and slightly curved.

"You have it tagged and located?"