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

survivors were mostly cynical and opportunistic skunks, crooked cops and worse,
who'd sell their own grandmother for a dollar. Sam was the only man she knew in
the whole Company who'd once had a gun duel with himself.
Of course, there were worlds where one of them existed, or neither existed or
were now alive, and ones where Colonel Barker's only child had been a son and
Mrs. Horowitz had borne a Jewish-American Princess. But when you had a
duplicate, he or she might be, at least physically, a perfect copy. Same genes,
same fingerprints, everything. That was a favorite Company method of taking
control of something. Nabbing a real person in authority and switching them for
a duplicate, well briefed, hypnoed, and absolutely identical to everybody else,
but who was really a Company stooge.
Of course, that was also a favorite trick of enemies of the Company who could
gain illicit use of the Labyrinth.
That's how she'd met her twin and both of them hooked on the juice and under the
control of a Company enemy engaged in a not so gentle attempt at a Company
takeover. He'd been pathetic for all his cleverness and callous cruelty, though.
The kind of folks he'd recruited from various worlds to do his dirty work had
hated him as much as the rest of the Company. They were fanatics with access to
the Labyrinth and its powers and it had been real hell rooting them out-if they
had been. At least one, the most dangerous of the bunch, was still out there,
somewhere. She had met him only a few times, and always under the worst of
conditions, but still he haunted her nightmares. The Company admitted they
couldn't find him, couldn't even identify him or his home world, but they were
confident that he was now bottled up, contained somewhere where he could not use
the Labyrinth without them knowing and catching him.
She doubted it. She was certain that Carlos was out there, somewhere, perhaps in
a world that ran at a slower rate than hers but with a higher level of
technology, plotting and planning and recruiting and solving the new roadblocks
the Company had put in his way.
The speaker suddenly brought the sound of the man upstairs crying out and
coughing horribly. She jumped up and went up to him.
He was delirious, thrashing about on the bed, mumbling "No, no! Insanity! It is
all insanity!"
She tried to calm him down, tell him it was all right, get through to him.
Suddenly he startled her by seeming to come awake, eyes wide, looking straight
at her. "The maze! Monstrously twisted, stupid plot so grandiose it might just
work! Got to warn them. Got to . . ."
"What plot? Whose?" she asked, trying to get what she could. Every little bit of
time saved might help.
He stared at her, wild-eyed and uncertain, and she realized that she neither
looked nor sounded like the sort of folks he was used to dealing with. What he
saw was a black woman, possibly thirty or about that, perhaps five five or so in
her bare feet, weighing in at over two hundred pounds, with a huge, thick mane
of woolly black hair and big brown eyes that looked far older than the rest of
her.
"I'm Brandy Horowitz, Company Station Manager here," she told him. "You're in my
house near the station. You came in without triggering our alarms, cut and
frostbitten. A doctor who's retained by the Company has looked at you, but
nobody else knows you're here."
He hesitated a moment, still a bit wild-eyed and uncertain. "Says you, Madam."