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

The boy swung the beam toward Fracarro. She stumbled backward as soon as it hit her and the door
slid shut. The elevator dropped.
Edelman pulled his hands away from his eyes. The boy swung the beam around and he kicked it out of
his hand. He lunged across the elevator like a man demonstrating self-defense in slow motion and the
edge of his big hand collided with the side of the boy's neck. He finished the job with a chop on the back
of the neck and the boy keeled over and landed face down on the gorilla.
The door opened. High, excited voices echoed against the walls of the basement. They all had on gas
masks and the boy had a supersonic beam in his hand.
Edelman grabbed up the beam lying next to the unconscious gorilla. The beam in the boy's hand
burned his face. One of the girls yelled something about getting him for what he did to Hector and he
pointed the beam in his hand at the boy and thumbed the switch forward with that terrible ache spreading
through his brain again. For a moment he and the boy stood there lashing each other with invisible whips.
The boy yelled and threw up his hands. He staggered backward with his head bent over. Edelman
stepped through the elevator door with the beam in one hand and a gas bomb in the other.
Half a dozen children were standing around a wheeled console that had been parked in the middle of
the broad walk behind the pool. On the other side of the console, frightened eyes peering over gags, Mr.
and Mrs. David Rice and their daughter Beatrice were sitting on deck chairs with their hands tied
underneath the seats.
The elevator door slid shut behind him. The boy and the two girls backed away from him down the
side of the pool. Every child in the room had on a gas mask. In the group around the console three boys
and a girl were holding long poles as if they were lances.
A chubby boy stepped away from the console and pointed a toy rifle at Edelman's legs. "Stay where
you are, Coppy. Don't move one step farther. We aren't kidding about the hostages. They've got time
capsules loaded with TSA-58 sitting in their stomachs. The girl standing over there has the neutralizer.
Turn around and go back, or she'll destroy every pill in that jar."
Edelman stopped. On the other side of the console a girl was holding up a double-chambered flagon.
One chamber was half full of pills and the other chamber was full of some liquid and she was gripping a
valve in the waist with her right hand.
Nightmares danced in his head. The gun the boy was holding looked like a spring-powered toy dart
gun but the cylinder sticking out of the muzzle was a self-activating injector, not a dart. The poles all had
injectors mounted on them, too, and he thought he could guess the name of the chemical the injectors
were loaded with. TSA-58 could be manufactured in either pill or liquid form.
***


Edelman didn't have to fake his reaction. TSA-58 was one of the hundreds of unpleasant facts he had
lived with every working day since he had become a cop, but it still made every cell on his skin cringe. A
modified version of one of the enzymes used to improve IQ's, it interfered with the metabolism of the
brain and flooded the brain cells with a by-product that attacked the memory cells the same way
mutation-causing chemicals attacked the genes. The victims acquired false and fantastic memories and
they had to be re-educated as if they were children and taught exactly what information in their heads
was real and what was false. They could spend years of their lives tormented by nightmares and demons
and pestered at every step by false information.
Fracarro whispered code talk in his ear. "I heard him. I assume you're going to move in on them. I'll
give you three minutes and then I'll come down the elevator and toss in a smoke bomb. Tell me if you
don't want me to. I've already told the dispatcher to get the neutralizer on the way. I've filled this room
with smoke and I don't think they can see me. I won't use a gas bomb until you say so."
Edelman glanced at the console. One of the screens was jet black.
"Hold on a minute," he said. "I came here to talk to you. Why won't you tell us what you want? What
are you trying to do?"