"H. Beam Piper - Dearest" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

There was his nephew, Stephen Hampton, greying at the temples but youthfully dressed in sports-clothes,
leaning with obvious if slightly premature proprietorship against the fireplace, a whiskey-and-soda in his
hand. There was Myra, Stephen's smart, sophisticated-looking blonde wife, reclining in a chair beside the
desk. For these two, he felt an implacable hatred. The others were no less enemies, perhaps more
dangerous enemies, but they were only the tools of Stephen and Myra. For instance, T. Barnwell Powell,
prim and self-satisfied, sitting on the edge of his chair and clutching the briefcase on his lap as though it
were a restless pet which might attempt to escape. He was an honest man, as lawyers went; painfully
ethical. No doubt he had convinced himself that his clients were acting from the noblest and most
disinterested motives. And Doctor Alexis Vehrner, with his Vandyke beard and his Viennese accent as
phony as a Soviet-controlled election, who had preempted the chair at Colonel Hampton's desk. That
rankled the old soldier, but Doctor Vehrner would want to assume the position which would give him
appearance of commanding the situation, and he probably felt that Colonel Hampton was no longer the
master of "Greyrock." The fifth, a Neanderthal type in a white jacket, was Doctor Vehrner's attendant
and bodyguard; he could be ignored, like an enlisted man unthinkingly obeying the orders of a superior.

"But you are not cooperating, Colonel Hampton," the psychiatrist complained. "How can I help you if
you do not cooperate?"

Colonel Hampton took the cigar from his mouth. His white mustache, tinged a faint yellow by habitual
smoking, twitched angrily.

"Oh; you call it helping me, do you?" he asked acidly.

"But why else am I here?" the doctor parried.

"You're here because my loving nephew and his charming wife can't wait to see me buried in the family
cemetery; they want to bury me alive in that private Bedlam of yours," Colonel Hampton replied.

"See!" Myra Hampton turned to the psychiatrist. "We are persecuting him! We are all envious of him!
We are plotting against him!"

"Of course; this sullen and suspicious silence is a common paranoid symptom; one often finds such
symptoms in cases of senile dementia," Doctor Vehrner agreed.

Colonel Hampton snorted contemptuously. Senile dementia! Well, he must have been senile and
demented, to bring this pair of snakes into his home, because he felt an obligation to his dead brother's
memory. And he'd willed "Greyrock," and his money, and everything, to Stephen. Only Myra couldn't
wait till he died; she'd Lady-Macbethed her husband into this insanity accusation.

"... however, I must fully satisfy myself, before I can sign the commitment," the psychiatrist was saying.
"After all, the patient is a man of advanced age. Seventy-eight, to be exact."

Seventy-eight; almost eighty. Colonel Hampton could hardly realize that he had been around so long. He
had been a little boy, playing soldiers. He had been a young man, breaking the family tradition of Harvard
and wangling an appointment to West Point. He had been a new second lieutenant at a little post in
Wyoming, in the last dying flicker of the Indian Wars. He had been a first lieutenant, trying to make
soldiers of militiamen and hoping for orders to Cuba before the Spaniards gave up. He had been the
hard-bitten captain of a hard-bitten company, fighting Moros in the jungles of Mindanao. Then, through
the early years of the Twentieth Century, after his father's death, he had been that rara avis in the
American service, a really wealthy professional officer. He had played polo, and served a turn as military