"Chalker, Jack L - G.O.D. Inc 3 - The Maze in the Mirror" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

official name that gave exquisite pleasure at the cost of slavery to it. Even
though she'd been hooked by the nastiest bastards ever to attack the Company and
against her will, and even though she'd gone through torture and long treatments
to beat it, the memory still lingered. Once you were on it you'd degrade
yourself, do anything to stay on it. She'd done a lot of that. And she was one
of the very few to make it back, to break the addiction without breaking her
mind and body as well.
But she still wanted it. Craved it, and knew that if it was ever put in her
grasp again she'd take it and never be able to get off.
It was that that scared her most. Somewhere out there the evil genius who'd come
up with the diabolical plan that almost broke the ruling class of the Company
world was still there. They'd caught his boss and his underlings, but the man
known as Doctor Carlos, world of origin unknown, background unknown, was still
out there somewhere.
Oh, the Company had finally broken the secret of the drug, which was actually a
symbiotic organism that essentially took control of you, and if you took your
shots from them once a year the thing couldn't infect you, but she was never
sure it would work with her, even as it couldn't help those who were exiled
addicts-and she didn't underestimate Carlos, either. He had had as much time as
the Company to work on the thing.
The Company. You couldn't even get away from the Company on TV. Particularly not
on TV. New miracle gadget cuts kitchen time in half. . . Wonderful six-record
treasury from Reinhold Zeitermas, the world's best selling contrabassoon player
. . . Buy MirGrow, the secret plant food of the Orient. . . All that junk was
what the Company sold. Music treasuries from folks you never heard of, crazy
products that were pretty weird when they worked, you name it. Just call this
toll free number now. 1-800-. . . And the home shopping networks-it looked like
they were furnishing the merchandise even for the ones they didn't own or
control outright.
General Ordering and Development, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa. Big rucking joke.
G.O.D., Inc.
Well, they acted like their initials sometimes, that was for sure, and they had
more products than the junk they pushed to the public, too, and a lot more going
on around the world than their front indicated. Wherever merchandise moved, that
was them. The Mafia was a wholly owned and operated subsidiary, not just here
but around the world. Same went for the heroin of the Golden Triangle in Asia or
the big coke trade from South America. They subsidized whole governments, bought
and sold cops and politicians wholesale, and just about nobody even knew they
existed. How they got what they wanted in the communist world even she didn't
know, but she knew they were there in force. They probably sold all the damned
bugging devices the KGB used to the Kremlin while making it look like a state
factory.
In truth, they were a gigantic, amoral colonial empire, only the colonies didn't
know they were colonies. That's because almost nobody knew that invasions from
other worlds didn't have to come from the stars or fly around in saucers full of
little green men. No, there were more than enough worlds coexisting right now,
one on top of the other, for a nearly infinite distance in both directions.
Parallel worlds, they called it, although it was more like parallel universes.
Somewhere, somehow, almost everything that could have ever possibly have
happened did. Way up the line there were Earths where the dinosaurs never died