"Thomas Easton - Organic Future 03 - Woodsman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

"Can I help?"

Frederick shook his head. "Not unless you know the gengineers who made
him. I need to track them down and get them into court. With luck, they'll
testify that Renny is unaggressive, mild-mannered, and civic-minded, as nice
and safe a pussy-cat as any human being."

The dog barked. "As what?"

When Duncan laughed as well, Frederick let his face turn rueful. "Yes," he
said. "There's no denying they have more law than justice on their side." He
shrugged eloquently. "But I have hopes."



Bureaucrat though he had now been for years, Frederick Suida had been as
happy as he ever got to escape his office on the tenth floor of the Bioform
Regulatory Administration's building. The summer was hot, most of his
colleagues were less than congenial, and the intensely cloying odor of
honeysuckle blossoms penetrated every building in the city. The vines sought
the sun everywhere. They choked the city's parks and alleys. They curled
around the edges of windows, even crossing sills to invade the pots of house
plants. They were, in fact, as all-intrusive as any bureaucracy had ever been.

He had almost smiled when he decided to go. He had then checked an
Armadon, a vehicle genetically engineered from an armadillo, out of the BRA
parking barn. The genimal was an official vehicle, its two doors each bearing
the shield and monogram of his federal employer, but it was also long and low
and sleek enough to tell all the world of its enhanced metabolism. Its lines
were spoiled only by the essential bulges of its wheels and the strangely
cocked angles of the limbs that ran atop them. The passenger compartment in
the back was much less conspicuous. The computers that controlled the
genimal's nervous system, and thus its movements, were hidden in the
dashboard.

Now Frederick stepped out of Jeremy Duncan's lab to face the almost
deserted parking lot where he had left the Armadon. A line of shrubbery marked
the edge of the lab's lot. Beyond it was a turved greenway, and approaching on
that road was a massive Mack truck. It panted stertorously as it hauled a
heavy cargo pod along the road. There were no pedestrians.

For a moment, Frederick came near to smiling. He had once known two
truckers, friends of his own best friends. They had gone their way years
before and thus survived the slaughter that had let him become the humorless
thing that he was. He wondered where they were, what they were doing, whether
they still drove their oversized bulldogs.

He shrugged the memory away as the truck passed the building and grew
swiftly smaller in the distance, though he turned to follow it with his eyes.
As he did so, his eyes swept over the industrial park that concealed Duncan's