"Lois Gresh - Termination Node" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gresh Lois)

south.

But his lifestyle was none of Judy's business. He kept the place nice; that was all that mattered. The
wine-colored tiles were cool beneath her socks. The walls were scrubbed white. Most important, Judy
had ten phone lines, all supplied and secretly rigged by Trev one night while the other residents slept.

She slipped her key into door 3-2, entered her tiny apartment.

It was stiflingly hot. She hadn't been home in two days.

She carefully made her way across the living room to open the window. Minilamps, buzzers, batteries,
and 9-volt clips littered the car-pet, along with solar cells, wire leads, T-splicers, 555 timer chips, 3-volt
power packs, capacitors, resistors, tangles of cables, and stacks of technical journals.

God, she could hardly breathe in here. She pushed aside the flowered curtains, yanked up the window.
A slight breeze stirred. A warm breeze that did nothing to cool the sweat that coated her face and body.

She'd gazed from this window a million times. It was her window into the real world, where normal
people went about their daily business: the neighbors chatting as they watered the pink and purple
flowers dotting their tiny lawns—what did they talk about?; the neon convertibles, Jaguars, Fiats, and
Mercedes lining the curbs and roaring off to places unknown; all the perfect bodies, all the perfect
people.

It would be nice to enter their bodies, just for a day, to see what they saw, to talk to their friends... to
hang out with live people.

How did they get the numbers out of their heads? How could they do anything with the work chores
constantly grinding away, hounding them?

Yet, that's all her neighbors seemed to do: everything but work.

A car door slammed, then another. Down past the white stucco cottages and the silver-dollar trees with
their paper-thin tinkling leaves, two men were getting out of a white Pontiac Velux Plus. The four-door
hardtop was a strange car for southern California,

And the men weren't exactly California hunks.

The fellow on the driver's side was tall and thin and had a large bald spot fringed with gray hair. He was
wearing a brown suit and white shirt: hardly appropriate when it was close to a hundred degrees outside.

The other man looked as if he'd walked off the set of an action flick. Also tall, lie had the muscled body
of a stuntman. Dark sunglasses hid his eyes. California enough, except for the black beard, which
matched his hair: both were thick and long. Plus, this guy wore a navy blazer over a print shirt, with the
buttons open halfway down his chest.

Probably corporate types from Vegas, hoping to make a big score in the computer biz. There were more
slimy guys hoping to strike it rich in southern California than there were snails trying to mate.

The stunt hunk glanced at her apartment building. His face cocked briefly toward the third floor.