"Callahan 09 - Callahan's Key 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

Behind me, Zoey growled once, and subsided.
Baldy's eyes were like golf balls, and his skull had stopped reddening, but his grin got even bigger. Obviously I was wearing some kind of Kevlar vest. Figure out why later. He shot me three times in the face.
Zoey growled again. I stopped a couple of feet from him and folded my arms across my chest. "Now you're going to have to apologize," I said.
He looked at the gun, then me, then the gun, then me, then the gun- Erin piped up from over on the bartop. "Can I have his mittens, Daddy? They look just like woofy dogs."
"Yes, honey," I told her.
That unstuck Bрldy from his loop. He yanked his gaze toward Erin-then began quartering that section of the room for whoever had actually spoken.
"You're really stupid," she told him.
He stared at her, slowly worked out that he was in fact being addressed, and dissed, by an infant. Even with all he had to think about already, this outraged him. Or perhaps he was just panicked, operating on drug logic. In any case, he plumbed new depths of stupidity: he lifted his gun and shot Erin.
She giggled. "That tickles," she informed him.
Nikky, the Duck, and I all leaped at the same instant, and were barely in time. Between us, we were just able to restrain Zoey. My wife is a large lady; it took everything we had, and we might not have managed it if her forebrain had been functioning at the time. She bit me on the ear and drew blood without realizing it. I got hold of her face and held it a couple of inches from mine until her eyes focused and I could see she recognized me, and then I said very urgently, "We do not have time to dick around with disposing of bodies just now."
She closed her eyes momentarily-then nodded and slumped. We let her go at once, and I turned back to my guests.
They were backing away, very slowly-but froze once I was looking at them again. Rambo wasn't even bothering to gesture talismanically with his Webley; it hung forgotten at his side. Baldy's scalp was so pale, it seemed to glow, and his swastikas blazed like embarrassment on his white cheeks. He snapped out of his trance, cracked his piece, took a speedloader from some pocket. . . then saw my expression and dropped both on the floor.
"I am very, very sorry," he said sincerely.
"So am I," Rambo said, "even though he did it."
"I got excited, you know?" Baldy said. "I thought it was a midget."
"You're an asshole," his partner told him.
"No argument. And I really am very very very sorry."
"Not yet," I told him. "But you will be."
"You're gonna take our souls now, right?"
Beside me, the Lucky Duck emitted that wonderful, honking laugh of his. "What do you figure the market value of these two souls might bee"
"Two rubles?" I hazarded.
He looked at me. "There's no need to insult them."
I shrugged. "Do I need a reason?" I turned back to the cowering pair. "Your souls 1 condemn you to keep. But we'll have your clothes."
They gaped.
"All of them."
Both of them, as one, looked to Zoey. Whatever they saw in her eyes made their knees start to tremble. Baldy turned to Rambo. "Shoot me," he begged.
"Me first," Rambo said, and lifted the Webley toward his own head.
Erin got him square in the eye with a jet of high pressure hot water from the hose in the sink behind the bar. He dropped the gun and started tearing at the fastenings of his coat, crying, "I'msorryl'msorryl'msorry-" After a moment Baldy followed his example.
After a while I moved forward to collect the guns. The pair backed away as I approached, shedding items of clothing as they went.
"Can I look at the guns, Daddy?" Erin asked.
"Sure, honey," I said, and brought them to her, reloading the Magnum for her before setting it down within her reach.
Even half naked in the midst of total confusion and terror, this got to Rambo. "You'd give a loaded gun to an infant"" he asked me.
"Somebody gave one to you," I said. "Keep going."
He glanced at Erin, who was struggling to lift the Webley-fumbled with shirt buttons-said the hell with it and tore the thing open.
It was reasonably safe, would have been even if Erin had been a normal baby. Everyone in the room-except the two stripping penitents, Tesla, and the Lucky Duck-was bulletproof. The rest of us had all long since been impact shielded by Mickey Finn, that cyborged Filarii warrior I mentioned earlier. I myself had once personally tested the shielding by setting off a nuclear weapon at arm's length, and it worked just fine. (Okay, I'm exaggerating a little: it was only a homemade pony-yield nuke, strictly kiloton-range stuff. But I wasn't worried about stray .44 slugs.)
A little while after that, we sent those fellows on their way, traveling considerably lighter than when they'd arrived. When we last saw them, they had none of the stuff they'd arrived with-not even Baldy's nipple rings. But since it was twenty below out there, and the sun was setting by now, we didn't send them out totally naked. Each was tastefully attired in a little strip of plastic, locked very tightly around his thumbs behind his back, doing just what it was designed to do: secure a bag of garbage. And, of course, each now wore a label as well: the word "LOOTER" in large capital letters, written across his belly in indelible laundry marker. No idea what ever became of either of them.


"Erin," Tesla said later, as we were all refreshing ourselves after the rude interruption, "I owe you an apology. Intellectually, I am perfectly aware that you are of high normal adult intelligence. After all, I was present on the night of your birth: I myself helped you interface with Solace, with the Internet, so that we could defeat the Lizard's dark side and save humanity. I know Solace accelerated the maturation of your cortex, and I'm aware that you've been raised with the help of an Al kernel she left behind when she died. But I confess that emotionally, I have continued to think of you as merely a very precocious infant-perhaps because your strength and coordination lag somewhat behind your intellect. Yet you acted more quickly and more rightly than any of the rest of us, just now, with that water hose. I thought we had lost the one in the camouflage gear." He bowed and kissed her hand. "I shall not make the same mistake again."
When my kid dimples, she dimples. "Thank you, Uncle Nikky. When I'm sixteen, I plan to start having sex- would you like to take a number? I can squeeze you in the single digits if you hurry."
Tesla was a virgin until shortly after he died. But he's made up for it since, and he was always a hard man to faze, and besides I think he was born gallant; he took it without blinking, and did not even glance at Zoey or me. "I would be honored, dear lady. You have my phone number," he said, and bowed again. Then he glanced at Zoey and me...and returned our grins.
"Okay, that little sideshow just now was fun, but let's get back to business," I said. "Nikky, I was going to ask you to explain exactly how the quest for knowledge is going to doom the universe, next, and then what the hell you expect us to do about it-but we can get to all that crap later Right now, let's cut to the important part: what's in it for me?"
This time Tesla blinked.
"My standard fee for saving the universe," I said, "is a bar, and enough money and clout to run it."
"Yes, of course, Jake. I told you, all these things will be arranged."
"I want 'em now. All of a sudden I've had enough of this dump. Enough of Long Island. Hand me the keys to my new cash register, and we can sit around and spend the next ten years figuring out what to do about Armageddon."
His mustache went back and forth a few times, as if to scrub something off his lower lip. "I, uh, do not exactly have a site for you, yet."
I nodded and held out my hand. "Okay. How about enough money to buy one?"
He looked pained. "Jake, you know I don't use money."
I sighed. "I'm supposed to save the universe on credit. Didn't you bring me anything for a down payment?"