"Tom Purdom-Greenplace" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

Greenplace
by Tom Purdom
This story copyright 1964 by Tom Purdom. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


On the outskirts of Greenplace, Nicholson seated himself in the wheelchair and took the drug injector
out of his shirt pocket. Rolling up his sleeve, he uncovered the lower half of his biceps. For a moment the
injector trembled above his flesh.
He put the injector down. Twisting around in the chair, he looked up at the sec standing behind him.
"Will you help me if I get into a fight?"
"I don't get paid to fight," the sec said.
"I thought you might do it for pleasure."
"I work for money."
Fear was a tingling nausea in his chest and stomach. A yes answer from a big, hulking man like the sec
should have made him feel a lot better. From the look of him, he had thought the sec might enjoy a fight.
The big man's face seemed to be set in a scowl of permanent disgust with a world which made such
trivial use of muscles. Ever since the invention of the voicetyper, which had made the old trade of
stenographer-typist obsolete, secs had been the lowest class of unskilled labor, status symbols hired on a
temporary basis merely to carry their employer's files and dictating equipment. He turned around in the
chair. Across the street the late afternoon sun fell on the lawns and houses of Greenplace. Children were
yelling and he could smell the grass. What was pain like? He couldn't remember. He had been forced to
endure it only once in his life, twenty-four years ago when he had been twelve and the doctors had given
his left eye a new set of muscles. Could he take it? Would he beg them for mercy?
"Don't think they don't know you made that last survey," Bob Dazella had told him. "Never
underestimate the Boyd organization. Every time a lawn gets mowed in that district, it goes in their
computer. You'd better go armed. Believe me, you go into Greenplace unarmed and you may come out
a cripple."
Glued to the middle finger of his left hand was a scrambler, a finger-length tube which fired a tight
beam of light and sound in a pattern designed to disrupt the human nervous system. In his lower left shirt
pocket he had a pair of bombs loaded with psycho-active gas and in the bottom of the wheelchair he had
installed a scent generator and a sound generator. He didn't know what the two generators could do for
him if he got into trouble, but they had been the only other portable weapons he could think of. He didn't
think anything could help him very much. MST-- melasynchrotrinad-- had one bad side effect. It
disrupted coordination. Once the drug hit his nervous system he would be a helpless lump of flesh for the
next four hours.
Again the injector trembled above his biceps. He shook his head disgustedly. He pressed the release
and two cc's of red liquid shot into his arm. Behind him the sec stiffened. He put the injector back in his
pocket.
It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in late summer. He was sitting in the shade of a tall apartment
tower, the last one for several miles. In front of him Greenplace looked comfortable and pleasant. Lawn
mowers hummed across the grass while their owners watched them with sleepy eyes. On every lawn
there was at least one person sprawling in the sun. Greenplace had been built in the early 1970's and it
was typical of its period. Every block had fewer than fifteen houses and every house had a lawn and a
back yard.
 He sat tensely in the chair. He could feel the chemistry of his fear mingling with the disturbing chemistry