"Jeffrey Thomas - The Hate Machines" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thomas Jeffrey)

smash that little bastard's face in ... but the thing had cost good money,
hadn't it?

He never would have volunteered to work two hours late before, but now
here he was, driving home in the dark, with some nice overtime to show for
his dedication. He was relieved, however, to get away from that nasty
little sun-or-moon-faced mockery with its sarcastic, sadistic Cheshire
grin. He hoped he had turned its yellow heart a nice shade of moldy gray
with all the negative energies he had contentedly projected into it
tonight.
The colony city of Punktown at night was like driving through a vast
kaleidoscope. An immense holographic advertisement for a new children's
movie had hundreds of ghostly purple teddybears parachuting endlessly from
the pinkish underbelly of the black sky. An old shunt line passed along a
tunnel straight through a building that looked like it was carved from one
titanic block of translucent amber, while the dome-like structure next
door had an exterior like wrinkled, mummified skin (which maybe it was).
Mostly humans had settled here, but more exotic races were represented by
buildings like that leathery dome, and vehicles like the fin-covered
canary-yellow contraption which buzzed so low over Cardiff's roof that he
heard the shriek of brief, scraping contact.
"Son of a bitch!" he barked, slamming the heel of his palm on his console.
He stabbed his horn, long and loud. He saw the yellow vehicle drop to his
level just ahead of him. In the rear window, a passenger with a
checkerboard face of alternating yellow and blue bubbles made a jerking
gesture that could only be unfriendly. "Alien freak," Cardiff hissed. He
began to accelerate, as if to ram his hovercar straight into the back of
theirs, but caught himself ... and luckily the yellow machine lifted again
and coasted on ahead to find another gap to drop into.
"Got to calm down," he whispered to himself. "I'll get myself shot one of
these days." He had once cursed out the window at a vehicle, only to have
a pistol pointed at him out one of their windows, just as a warning.
He had bought a gun of his own, a few weeks ago. He hadn't told Saundra,
his wife. No one knew that he owned it ... or that he had brought it to
work last week, though he had left it in his briefcase. The next day after
he brought it to work, and brought it back home, he had purchased the
Scapegoat.
He made a note to himself to get a smaller version of the Scapegoat for
his car, as soon as he could afford to do so.

When he let himself into his apartment, Cardiff saw that Saundra sat on
the sofa in the darkened livingroom, her friend Seth seated beside her.
Seth hastily withrew his hand from the low V of her clingy, violet
sweater, and sat back from her with a jolt. Saundra, however, cocked her
head back to gaze up at her husband blandly. Cardiff had quickly averted
his eyes, as if he had been the one who'd been caught, and lingered there
in the doorway with his coat and his briefcase.
"I thought you had gone to see your parents, when you didn't come home,"
Saundra said.
He still didn't look at his attractive wife, embarrassed that he had