"Chad Oliver - King of the Hill" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

KING OF THE HILL
Chad Oliver

[27 nov 2001—scanned, proofed and released for #bookz]

She floated there in the great nothing, still warm and soft and blue-green if you could eyeball her
from a few thousand miles out, still kissed under blankets of clouds.
Mama Earth. Getting old now, tired, her blankets soiled with her own secretions, her body bruised
and torn by a billion forgotten passions.
Like many a mother before her, she had given birth to a monster. He was not old, not as planets
measure time, and there had been other children. But he was old enough. He had taken over.
His name?
You know it: there are no surprises left. Man. Big Daddy of the primates. The ape that walks like a
chicken. Homo sap. Ah, the tool-maker, flapper of tongues, builder of fires, sex fiend, dreamer,
destroyer, creator of garbage ...
You know me, Al.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall—
Ant is the name, anthill is the game.
There were many men, too many men. They have names.
Try this one on for size: Sam Gregg. Don't like it? Rings no bells? Not elegant enough? Wrong
ethnic affiliation?
Few among the manswarm, if any, cared for Sam Gregg. One or two, possibly, gave a damn about
his name. A billion or so knew his name.
Mostly, they hated his guts—and envied him.
He was there, Sam Gregg, big as life and twice as ugly.
He stuck out.
A rock in the sandpile.

They were after him again.
Sam Gregg felt the pressure. There had been a time when he had thrived on it; the adrenaline had
flowed and the juices bubbled. Sure, and there had been a time when dinosaurs had walked the earth.
Sam had been born in the year that men had first walked on the moon. (It had tickled him, when he was
old enough to savor it. A man with the unlikely name of Armstrong, no less. And his faithful sidekick,
Buzz. And good old Mike holding the fort. Jesus.) That made him nearly a century old. His doctors were
good, the best. It was no miracle to live a hundred years, not these days. But he wasn't a kid anymore, as
he demonstrated occasionally with Lois.
The attacks were not particularly subtle, but they were civilized. That meant that nobody called you
a son of a bitch to your face, and the assassins carried statistics and platitudes instead of knives and
strangling cords.
Item. A bill had been introduced in Washington by good old Senator Raleigh, millionaire defender of
the poor. Stripped of its stumbling oratorical flourishes, it argued that undersea development was now
routine and therefore that there should be no tax dodges for phony risk capital investment. That little
arrow was aimed straight at one of Sam's companies—at several of them, in fact, although the somewhat
dim-witted Raleigh probably did not know that. Sam could beat the bill, but it would cost him money.
That annoyed him. He had an expensive hobby.
Item. Sam retained a covey of bright boys whose only job it was to keep his name out of the
communications media. They weren't entirely successful; your name is not known to a billion people on a
word-of-mouth basis. Still, he had not been subjected to one of those full-scale, no-holds-barred,
dynamic, daring personal close-ups for nearly a year now. One was coming up, on Worldwide. The
mystery man—revealed! The richest man in the world—exposed! The hermit—trapped by fearless