"Wilson-ToTheVectorBelong" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wilson Robin)

ROBIN WILSON

TO THE VECTOR BELONG . . .

A HANDSOME YOUNG MAN whose broad shoulders stretch orange coveralls with
"ALAMEDA COUNTY JAIL" stenciled on the back hunches over his shot glass of Black
Label and prints liquid circles on a scarred Formica bar top as he ponders the
deaths of the two who have preceded him. "Some kind a internal screw-up. A
flitch? But what they told us was, in penetrations of Category I societies like
this it's just as likely to be some little thing like the goddamn packaging as
anything else," he says to fake Lindstrom.

"Glitch," says Lindstrom. "Not flitch. Go on, tell me about it." He has sprawled
patiently for nearly four hours on the end stool at the dark bar, his back
propped against a stub of wall. He is gangly and so fair he looks ghostly in the
gloom, hair blond enough to be almost white. Much of it is. He is twenty days
away from retirement after more than thirty-five years in the Department of
Justice as a Contract Agent, mostly under cover of one depth or another.

"Glitch." repeats the young man, whose name sounds to Lindstrom like Al or maybe
Earl. "Well, it couldn't have been something that simple," he says. "The other
guys never even got started."

Lindstrom nods encouragingly, as if he understands what the young man is talking
about. He is good at friendly interrogation, elicitation, but he has a
reputation as a loner, a little eccentric, sometimes hard for desk people and
supervisors to deal with. He gets results but he is not an inside guy, has never
been seriously considered for Civil Service status.

On this late Tuesday afternoon in early January, two years into the 21st
century, he feels his sixty-one years. His back aches and so does the knee he
racked up kicking away a CS canister in Grant Park in 1968, and there is a sore
spot high on the left side of his ribcage from the little Dan Wesson .38 they
insisted he carry; a matching spot on the fight side where a Guardian Model 412
audio pickup and transmitter is about to run out of battery.

The young man is Lindstrom's prisoner, technically a deportee under Section 1103
of Chapter 75 of Title 18 of the United States Code but actually the first
genuine, honest-to-God extraterrestrial anyone outside supermarket tabloid
fantasy has ever encountered.

The dim saloon is empty, the bartender and two regulars flushed out hours ago to
tell their stories in excited voices to the frenzied crowd of journalists and
video paparazzi beyond the police lines. It is a dreary old establishment
located for more than sixty years on the street level of the Port of Oakland
container ship pier at the foot of Ferro Street. At a little after five PM the
light outside is already fading into soft Bay chill. Only an occasional siren or
police whistle penetrates the neon buzz of an Anchor Steam Beer sign above the