"Harry Harrison - SSR 04 - The Stainlees Steel Rat Wants You" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison Harry)

"Go to hell. No exceptions. Get out of here," he suggested.

I smiled at the unswerving gun and decided that explanation would be more fruitful than
violence.

"This is a bit of an emergency. My wife, the boys' mother, was arrested this morning and taken
away."

"It was due to happen. You lead undisciplined lives. Now get out."

"Listen, you dough-faced, moron-brained, military dinosaur, I came here for neither your
sympathy nor malice. If this was an ordinary arrest the arrestees would have been unconscious soon
after opening the door. Detectives, cops, military police, customs agents, none of those could
stand before the wrath of my sweet Angelina."

"Well?" he said, puzzled, but gun barrel still ready.

"She went along quietly in order to give me time. Time that I will need. Because I checked the
license plate numbers and these thugs were agents for . . ." I took a deep breath, agents for
Interstellar Internal and External Revenue."

"The income tax men," be breathed and his eyes glowed redly. The gun vanished. "James diGriz,
Bolivar diGriz, step forward. Accept these graduation certificates as token of your reluctant
completion of all courses and of time served here. You are now alumni of Dorsky Military Boarding
School and Penitentiary and I hope you will, like the other graduates, remember us with a little
curse before retiring each night. I would shake your hands except my bones are getting brittle and
I am laying off the hand-to-hand combat.

Go forth with your father and join him in the battle against evil and strike a blow for me as
well."

That was all there was to it. A minute later we were out in the sunshine and climbing into the
car. The boys left their childish possessions behind them in the school and entered the world of
adult responsibility.

"They won't hurt Mom, will they?" James asked. "They won't live long if they do," Bolivar
said, and I distinctly heard his teeth grinding together.

"No, of course not. Getting her release will be easy enough, as long as we can get to the
records in time."

"What records?" Bolivar asked. "And why did Dirty Dorsky help so easily? That's not like him."

"It is like him because under that veneer of stupidity, violence and military sadism he is
still roughly human like the rest of us. And like us, he regards the tax man as the natural
enemy."

"I don't understand," James said, then grabbed the handhold as we snarled around a tight bend
just a micrometer from the edge of the vertical drop.