"Ron Goulart - Nemo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

somewhere within its speaker grid, told him, "We've tentatively located
Leon Rovics at a synthetic-chicken ranch on the outskirts of Burlingame,
California. The allegedly unpaid for jetractor is overparked across the
square from the local Grange dome . . ."
Picking up an electric pencil, Ted made a notation on a fresh deadbeat
chart. "Rovics is pretty good," he said to himself. "Been elusing us since
2018. What with depreciation that stupid jetractor isn't going to be worth
more than thirty-five hundred dollars now."
Bleep! said an ID box. A glowing red circle appeared around one of the
faces. The crawl had ceased.
Ted squinted at the face. That stuff the bed had swished into his eyes
was causing him to see things a little fuzzy up close. "Hey, that's Roosevelt
Nixon Thomas, the guy with the six unpaid-for electronic jukeboxes. Do
we have a location on him?"
A new red X appeared on one of the mapper screens.
"Tentative loke. Man answering description of Roosevelt Nixon Thomas
is employed as a waterski mender in Mystic, Connecticut. Five of the six
allegedly unpaid for electronic jukeboxes are supposedly reposing in the
loft of an imitation clam-chowder factory in the vicinity . . ."
"Five out of six isn't bad." Ted reached out to punch a repo order on his
pickup box.
More faces went rolling by on the ID machines. Then another of the
boxes said Bleep!
A new face halted on the screen. "Hey, don't tell me he's mixed up with
us?" Ted asked.
"This is the notorious Reverend Jose S. Ortega, commonly known as Rev
O," explained a reader. "Long sought by the federal government for a
multitude of seditious and near-seditious acts, the infamous cleric has
now fallen into our jurisdiction by neglecting to keep up the payments on
a stungun purchased from a Gunmartz outlet in Cambridge, Mass., under
a flimsy alias."
Rev O was about forty, long-faced and heavy-jawed. A pleasant-looking
guy, though. Especially for a deadbeat.
Ted had often seen footage about Ortega on the news. Usually the
reverend would surface to commit some antigovernment act or to protest
some government abuse. A dedicated man, brave certainly, but somehow
not as interesting a person as Dr. Norvell Perola. Ted started a file on Rev
O by punching a green button on the edge of his desk.
Bleep!
Something odd had turned up on one of the ID boxes. It wasn't a photo
of a face. There was a drawing on the screen, a large pen-and-ink sketch of
a vaguely familiar little boy in an old-fashioned ankle-length nightgown.
Ted's eyebrows raised. He said, "Hey, of course! This is what the dream
is all . . ."
Then he forgot. He could no longer speak. He sat staring at the
drawing.
Slowly he fell asleep, eyes remaining open.
After he'd sat that way for nearly ten minutes a door gently opened.
This door wasn't where any door was supposed to be.
Someone Ted knew arrived in the doorway. Quietly he said, "Come