"Robert A. Metzger - Planet of the Dolphins" - читать интересную книгу автора (Metzger Robert)

convulsed, danced, every muscle spasming. He hit the ground, flipping and flopping,
looking just like a fish out of water.

Herman stared through a window on the twenty-seventh floor of the Elyis
Presley Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. High noon and the distant Vegas Strip
looked ugly and drab, cars and cabs scuttling up and down the road, darting in and
out of casino parking lots, looking just like cockroaches in search of cake crumbs.
He only glanced at the scene for a moment, and then looked farther west, out toward
Red Rock Canyon.

Aqualand.

The dolphin pools seemed to blaze — the late-afternoon sun reflecting from
them. Herman wished the blaze was real, that burning gasoline instead of salt water
filled those pools and that the dolphins were being turned into charcoaled
briquettes.

“Burn, Flipper,” he whispered.

“That aggression is misplaced.”

Herman turned around. Dr. Julian Stearns Cutler was seated behind the plastic
table. His hands were neatly folded, resting on a thick, dog-cared folder. His white
lab coat was wrinkle-free and the pens in his pocket perfectly aligned from right to
left in descending order of height.

His hair was slicked back, flawless, not a strand out of place.

He smiled.

Herman found the so-sincere, compassion-filled smile nauseating. He always
did. He’d seen that smile far too many times.

Herman shuffled toward the table, the only sound he made being the scrap of
his paper booties against the linoleum floor. He pulled out the plastic chair on his
side of the table and slowly sat. He folded his hands, mimicking Dr. Cutler, and then
offered up his own smile.

“Of course it’s misplaced, Doctor,” he said with the sweetest, most sincere
voice he could manage without actually blowing his lunch. “Perhaps my obsession,
the key to all this aggression, stems back to the hatred of my mother, Mrs. Melville,
that kind and gray-haired old soul who could not resist naming her son Herman,
forever linking me to the cetaceans.”

“What do you think?” asked Dr. Cutler, leaning forward. Having unfolded his
hands, he was now tugging at his chin as if some phantom goatee hung there.

Herman chuckled. If he’d had a nickel for every time that had been asked of
him he could have opened his own nuthouse and spent the rest of his life in the
comfort and spendor of the Napoleon suite. He narrowed his eyelids to slits. “I think