"Ron Goulart - The Panchronicon Plot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

"Do you have anything to report?"
"No more than I already have. I'm not going to call on True again until tomorrow," said Dr.
Madrid. "These things have to be deftly handled."
"Don't tell me, tell him."
"I will tell him if he doesn't cease this bullyragging of me. I'm looking forward to being
Assistant Secretary of Medicine, Bruce, but I won't put up with a whole lot of—"
"You shouldn't mention my name right out like that."
"Why not? No one can bug this type of phone, and besides you've got a bag over your head.
What's more, there are millions of Bruces in the world."
"Do you have anything I can pass on to him?"
"Tell him there is nothing new to report, Bruce. Buford True has been offered what he thinks is
a job as a consultant with the Time Travel Overseeing Committee. He turned it down, prefers to
remain a teacher. Should he refuse again tomorrow, I'll let the exuberant Hellroarers try a more
direct type of persuasion."
"You better watch yourself, not get too cocky," warned bagheaded Bruce. "He's liable to add
you to his mumblespool."
"Not a man of my ability."
"That's what Plautz thought. Then he put his name and time destination on the mumblespool
and off went Plautz to Chaucerian England."
"For Plautz that's a step up. Now I must get back to Mrs. Gurney." He broke the connection.
"At least the blooming ringing in me ears has ceased, doc," said the fat woman when Dr.
Madrid returned to her backside.
"Very good, very good."
"Oof! Ow! Oh!"
Conger moved to the door of the suite, at the next series of yowls he let himself out.
12 RON GOULART



Chapter 4
Conger waited until dusk so he wouldn't cast a shadow. Then he drove his rented landcar out
along the arrow-straight road from the center of the adobe and neon New Mexico Free Colony
toward the Free Colony Free School Kibbutz.
He got no closer than a mile of the place. Smack in the middle of the roadway a black and
white landcar was lying belly-up and burning. Flames went wooshing up into the darkening day,
smoke swirled and snaked. Neowood sawhorses blocked the road beyond the crackling car. At least
ten cops, most of them human, were posted on the road a safe distance off.
Standing clear of the car and the barricades were nearly a hundred people. They carried sticks,
agricultural implements, limbs torn off robots, torches.
Conger backed up, swung off the road to park in among a group of shaggy-armed joshua trees.
"You in favor of Linus Xavier DeWald or Virgilio Campos Gonzo?"
The question was shouted in his window by a large Mexican holding a fisted robot arm.
"I'm not even registered to vote in this area." Conger eased out of the car. "Merely a tourist
taking a quiet drive through—"
"Suppose you did live around here? Would you want them to name the kibbutz school after a
mealy-mouthed, mincing-stepped, arch quisling like the late departed, and none too soon, Linus
Xavier DeWald or after a god-fearing, stand-up-and-fight, don't-give-an-inch national hero such as
Virgilio Campos Gonzo?"
"When you put it that way I can see it would be folly not to select—"
"Gonzo was no patriot!" A hefty redhaired woman in a plaid jumpsuit intruded, clutching a