"Spider Robinson - The Magnificent Conspiracy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

wave hit. But I believe that the second will be a tsunami."
My voice was a whip. "And this is how you're going to save the world? By doing
lube jobs and fixing mufflers?"
"This is one of the ways, yes. It's not surgery, but it should help comfort the
patient until surgery can be undertaken. It's hard to concen-trate on anything when
you have a boil on your ass."
"What?"
"Sorry. A metaphor I borrowed from John Smiley, at the same time I borrowed
the idea itself. `Ray,' he said to me, `you're talking about using your money to make
folks more comfortable, to remove some of the pointless distrac-tions so they have
the energy to sit down and think. Well, the one boil on everybody's ass is his
vehicleтАФeverybody that has to have one, which is most everybody.' Everywhere I
went over the next decade, I heard people bitterly complaining about their cars,
pouring energy and money into them, losing jobs because of them, going broke
because of them, being killed because of them. So I'm lancing the boilтАФin this area
anyway.
"It makes an excellent test operation, too. If people object too strongly to having
their boils lanced, then I'll have to be extremely circum-spect in approaching their
cancers. Time will tell."
"And no one's tried to stop you from giving away cars?"
"I don't give away cars. I sell them at a fair price. But the effect is similar, and yes,
there have been several attempts to stop me by vari-ous legal means. But there has
never been a year of my life when I was being sued for less than a million dollars.
"Then there were the illegal attempts. For a while this lot was heavily, and
unobtrusively, guarded, and twice those guards found it neces-sary to break a few
arms. I've dismissed them all for the duration of the lull between waves, but there'll
be an army here if and when I need it.
"But until the next wave of customers hits, the only violence I'm expecting is a
contract assas-sination or two."
"Oh?"
The anger drained from my voice as profes-sional control switched in again. I
noted that his right hand was out of sight behind his chairтАФon the side I had not yet
seen. I sat bolt upright.
"Yes, the first one is due any time now. He'll probably show up with a plausible
identity and an excellent cover story, and he'll probably demand to see the manager
on the obvious pretext. He'll wear strikingly gaudy shoes to draw the attention of
casual witnesses from his face, and his shirt will have a high collar, and he'll hold his
spine very straight. He'll be completely untraceable, expensive, and probably good at
his work, but his employers will almost certainly have kept him largely in the dark,
and so he'll underestimate his opposition until it is too late. Only then will he realize
that I could have come out of that pit with an M-16 as easily as with a pipe wrench if
the situation had seemed to warrant it. What is that thing, anyway? It's too slim for a
blowgun."
If you've lost any other hope of misdirecting the enemy, try candor. I sighed,
relaxed my features in a gesture of surrender, and very slowly reached up and over
my shoulder. Gripping the handle that nestled against my last few vertebrae, I pulled
straight up and out, watch-ing the muscles of his right arm tense where they
disappeared behind the chair and wishing might-ily that I knew what his hand was
doing. I pointedly held the weapon in a virtually useless overhand grip, but I was
unsettled to see him pick up on thatтАФhe was altogether too alert for my taste. Hang