"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 02 - Greenhouse" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

past him, turn, and pace back as far as the strip of green that separated the
Garden from the electronics store next door. That strip was heavily overgrown
with the honeysuckle vines that had appeared everywhere in the past year or
so, and the vines, as always, bore a heavy crop of blossoms the size of small
wineglasses. Each one held a mouthful of nectar, self-fermented and laced with
a mildly euphoric drug.

The picketer plucked a blossom and drained its load of honeysuckle wine.
His eyes promptly glazed. Tom shook his head and walked around the man. At the
corner, he boarded a Bernie, a modified Saint Bernard with a passenger pod on
its back. A few blocks later, he was on the street again, and whistling as he
approached his apartment building. He was looking forward to the little time
he would have with Muffy. She was still what she had been when he first had
met her, the Spider Lady at The Spider's Web. An exotic dancer, necessarily a
night worker, and one with a following, too. But he was the only one of her
fans to...

A high-backed Armadon, mad offspring of a gene-splicer and an armadillo,
clattered down the road away from him. Like Roachsters, Armadons had wheels
grown from their shells; their legs ran backwards atop the wheels to turn
them, and that was what made the clatter. It had been parked near his own
front door, but that did not disturb him. This was city, and the streets were
lined with Roachsters, Hoppers, Beetles, and other vehicles. There were even a
few internal combustion antiques.

He only glanced at the knee-high evergreen shrubs that lined the walkway
between the sidewalk and the entrance to his building. He paid even less
attention to the ancient paneling in the building's small lobby, or the carved
moldings, or the marble floor beneath his feet. He had registered the
building's signs of age when he and Muffy had first moved in, pegged them as
too-ample sign that the place was a dump, and forgotten them. Now the building
was home, even if there were three flights of stairs between the street and
their apartment. He usually paused only long enough to see if Muffy had
fetched the mail and to unlock the glass door.

This time, however, Tom ignored the rack of mailboxes to his right. The
glass door was shattered, and the shards lay at the foot of the stairs, beyond
the frame. Someone had not waited to be buzzed in, or to get out their key. It
seemed, quite simply, that they had walked through the door as if it were not
there.

He froze, thinking that it must have happened very recently. No one had
begun to clean up the debris. Yet there were no cops around. Hadn't anyone
noticed?

He stepped through the door's empty frame, careful not to catch his
coverall on the jagged teeth that jutted from the rim. His feet crunched on
broken glass, and when he caught himself swearing at the noise, he wondered:
Whoever it was, could they still be here? What did they want? Whose apartment
door had they broken down? Who were they raping, murdering, torturing,