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

 Edelman shrugged. "We'll give it a try anyway. Can you send us a hospital, Dispatcher?"
"It'll be there in twelve minutes."
"What about the animals?" Fracarro asked. "What have they got in the house?"
"Two gorillas and a watchtiger are unaccounted for."
They checked their side-arms and put on their gas masks. Edelman helped Fracarro squirm into her
combat coverall and hooked her pack onto her back and she returned the favor. Tough plastic covered
them from head to foot and they had bulletproof padding around their torsos and their heads. A gorilla
could still break their bones if it got a grip on them, and a bullet in a leg, or an arm, could cripple them
and set them up for something worse, but they were protected from some of the more obvious injuries
Tim Rice might try to inflict on them.
The crowd shouted at them as they descended on the house. They stopped beside the balcony outside
the fifth-floor window and the two dragons raised their heads and hissed. The elephant's master shook
his fist. A girl pushed her head out the front door and stuck out her tongue.
"Back off, Coppy," the loudspeaker screamed. "Beat it. We've got three hostages and we're armed.
Don't push us. We aren't playing."
Edelman stepped onto the balcony. The car dropped away from him and he looked around wildly. He
took a special attachment out of his pack and squinted as he held his pistol in front of his face and
screwed the attachment on the muzzle. He jammed a heavy four-centimeter ball into the attachment and
winced as he fired it at the tough, burglarproof plastic. The plastic cracked and he stuffed another ball
into the attachment and fired again.
"Can't you hear us?" the loudspeaker blared. "We aren't kidding. You won't leave here alive."
The third ball slipped out of Edelman's fingers. He stamped his foot peevishly and bent over and
picked it up. In the yard on his left a woman ran up to the fence and climbed on a chair. "He's gonna
hurt my son! Stop him!"
The people standing in the yard with the woman moved toward the fence. The watchtiger snarled at
her and two men pulled her off the chair. Five men and women drew together and started talking.
On the balcony below Edelman, Fracarro's first ball slammed into the window in front of her. Edelman
held his gun in front of him at arm's length and winced as he fired again. Flaw lines appeared all over the
window and he tapped it with the muzzle of his gun and broke open a hole big enough to walk through.
He threw a gas bomb through the hole and stepped inside in a crouch. He waved his gun back and
forth in wide arcs and his eyes darted around the room as if he expected a hundred bad guys to leap at
him out of the mist.
A console crowded with screens and dials covered most of the wall in front of him. Most of the stuff
on the shelves hanging on the wall on his left looked like lab equipment. An electron microscope was
sitting next to a colorfully boxed kit for altering genes with a laser beam; an automated air station was
recording the content of the local atmosphere; something was swimming inside a life-support tank...
He slipped into one of the five code languages he had been taught during his five years at the police
college. "I'm in the boy's room," he said into his intercom. "It's full of wonderful educational toys."
"This one looks like the daughter's room," Fracarro said. "It looks like she put up a fight. Do you see
any educational death rays?"
Edelman tiptoed up to the console and looked over the equipment. In the center of the room the gas
bomb was still hissing. A ventilator in the ceiling was humming at emergency speed, but the green mist
was getting thicker every second.
***


The screen in the middle of the console lit up. Tim Rice scowled up at him. "I'm warning you for the
last time, Coppy. I'm watching every move you make. I've got eyes in every room in this house. I can kill
you anytime I want to."
Edelman backed away from the console. He turned on the loudspeaker on his belt and straightened