"E. E. Doc Smith - D' Alembert 4 - Getaway world" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

house. The odds against the agents' catching all of them off guard were pretty high. They
would have a fight on their hands before they were done this evening-but they had
expected that and were prepared for it. Their enemies were not.

The time for stealth had passed; speed would now be their best weapon. At the tiniest
nod from Jules, both of them took off down the stairs side-by-side at top speed, streaks
of fury moving at a rate that would have seemed impossible for normal human beings to
attain.

But then, the d'Alemberts were not exactly normal human beings. For more than ten
generations their family had resided on the planet DesPlaines, a world of heavy metals
and forbidding mountains with a surface gravity three times higher than that of Earth.
Weaklings were weeded out in the first two generations by the planet's harsh conditions.
The current inhabitants of DesPlaines were all superstrong and superfast. They had to
be-merely standing up and walking around in such a gravitational field would tax the
energies of normal people, not to mention the fact that, on a world where objects would
fall at three times the terrestrial rate of acceleration, a survivor had to have lightning re-

flexes. There was hardly any such thing as a "minor" accident on DesPlaines. Those who
survived were definitely the fittest.

But their genetic background was shared by more than seven million other inhabitants of
their home world. What made Jules and Yvette stand out even further was the family
heritage of the d'Alemberts, the long line of circus performers that traced all the way
back to the founding of the Circus of the Galaxy. Physical training and agility had been
the keynote of their education from the moment of their birth; now, at the very peak of
their careers, Jules and Yvette were the most perfect physical specimens humanity could
hope to produce.

Little wonder, then, that the two SOTS agents came flying down the stairs at speeds
calculated to dazzle the unsuspecting people they were hunting. The middle floor of the
house was populated by the servants, who were banished to this level to be out of the
way of the bigwigs conferring on the ground floor. They were small fry being caught in
the d'Alemberts' net, of no strategic value, but they had to be stunned anyway; they
would otherwise fight to protect the safety of the house, and a fight was the last thing the
DesPlainian siblings wanted.

As Jules raced into the final room on this floor, he spotted a servant standing beside a
basin. He fired his stunner on pure reflex, realizing at the instant he shot that the woman


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was drinking a glass of water. The glass fell from the woman's hand and, quick as
Jules's reflexes were, he still could not catch it before it hit the floor. The glass shattered
with a sound that seemed to fill the entire universe with its noise.

There was no help for it-the alarm was out now. The people downstairs would have
heard the sound and would be on edge until some explanation was forthcoming. Even