Read FICTION books online

Reading books fiction Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself.



Fiction genre suitable for people of all ages. Everyone will find something interesting for themselves. Our electronic library is always at your service. Reading online free books without registration. Nowadays ebooks are convenient and efficient. After all, don’t forget: literature exists and develops largely thanks to readers.
The genre of fiction is interesting to read not only by the process of cognition and the desire to empathize with the fate of the hero, this genre is interesting for the ability to rethink one's own life. Of course the reader may accept the author's point of view or disagree with them, but the reader should understand that the author has done a great job and deserves respect. Take a closer look at genre fiction in all its manifestations in our elibrary.



Read books online » Fiction » The Ambassador by Sam Merwin (most romantic novels .txt) 📖

Book online «The Ambassador by Sam Merwin (most romantic novels .txt) 📖». Author Sam Merwin



1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Go to page:
drink barely seventeen hours before. He began to wish he had not bet so thoughtlessly.

The second set went to deuce twice before Yamato-Rau broke O'Ryan's service to run it out at eight-six. This was two games more than the computer had calculated and caused considerable uproar in the crowd.

"I hear you had some trouble last night," Anderson told him.

"Nothing serious," said Lindsay, wondering how much the senator knew. Dammit, he thought, he wished he didn't like the power-hungry politician.

He wondered if Anderson were behind the attempt of the morning—and if he were behind it, why? There could, he decided, be all sorts of Machiavellian motives hidden beneath that smiling face. Then the match got under way once more, and Lindsay concentrated on the play.

Once again O'Ryan seemed to be in command—just as the computer had foretold. Games went to five-two in his favor. Then, as the players changed courts once more, the tall Irishman paused to towel off—and paid special attention to rubbing his eyes.

At that his string ran out. Four straight times his swiftest drives hit the top of the net and bounced back into his own court. He blew his service thanks to a pair of double-faults and three minutes later Yamato-Rau had taken the set while the crowd sat in stunned silence.

The fourth set was pitiful. O'Ryan played like a blind man and the Indonesian ran it out with the loss of exactly one point per game. The red line on the computer-board yawed wildly toward the bottom instead of following the white line as it should have.

"Keep your credits," Lindsay told Senator Anderson. "You were right. As it turned out I did know something after all."

"It's impossible!" cried the senator. "But it's cheap at the price—here!" He withdrew his wallet and began pulling out crisp hundred-credit notes.

"Look out!" cried Lindsay. Around them the stands had erupted into violence. While the players were shaking hands at the net, angry—and, Lindsay suspected, frightened—bettors and spectators leaped the low barriers and swarmed out onto the dark court. They hemmed the players in, driving them toward the wall directly under the UW box in which Lindsay and Anderson were sitting.

Someone threw something and Yamato-Rau stumbled and fell to his hands and knees. Swinging his racquet like one of his ancestors' shillalehs, O'Ryan charged to his rescue, pulled him to his feet, covered his retreat to the wall. There Lindsay was able to pull first the Indonesian, then the Irishman, up into the box.

"Damned fool!" said Anderson. "Getting us into a riot." But a moment later Lindsay saw the senator swinging hard at an angry customer with a fist in which his wallet was still clenched. The man made a grab for it as someone else hit Anderson over the head with a plastic bottle. He dropped across a contour-chair, letting his wallet fall from unconscious fingers.

UW police formed a protective wall around them and Pat O'Ryan, recognizing Lindsay, said, "Thanks, Ambassador. I guess I owe you a couple. If my eyes hadn't gone bad on me...."

Lindsay was tempted to admit his guilt in that matter but decided against it. He had no desire to be caught in another riot. He picked up Anderson's wallet, put it back in the still unconscious senator's breast pocket. A white-clad interne was brought through the police cordon, knelt beside Anderson and began to make repairs.

"You'd better leave now, Ambassador," said one of the boss policeman respectfully to Lindsay when the senator had been carted away on a stretcher. Lindsay nodded. Then he noticed a slip of paper lying beneath the chair across which Anderson had fallen. It read: rec. 10,000 cdt. 1 em. & di. neck. It was from Zoffany, the jeweler.

"What the hell!" Lindsay discovered he was speaking aloud. He stuffed the paper in his pocket and followed the officer through a maze of underground passages out of the Colosseum. He still thought, What the hell! What could Nina have reported about him that was worth that sort of money to the senator?

Spy, slattern or not, Nina was efficient, as he realised when a bowing motley-clad waiter captain smilingly ushered him to a secluded table for two in a banquet niche of the Pelican. It was Lindsay's first visit to an Earthly after-dark cafe and he instinctively compared it with certain of its imitations in the comparatively small cities of his native planet.

It was sleeker, better run, far more beautiful. Its general color scheme was darkly opalescent, subtly glowing, flattering to its clients. And, of course, most of them needed flattering, at least to Lindsay's alien eyes. He noted here a pair of scimitar-shaped spectacles whose turquoise-studded rims caught the light like a pair of small lemon pies, there a harmopan-covered female face that glowed pale green in the darkness.

But even more numerous and decorative than at the stadium, the gladiators and courtesans were present, reinforced by a larding of vidar stars visiting or entertaining in the capital. And these, Lindsay admitted to himself with awed reluctance, outshone in sheer beauty and handsomeness any group of Martian humans.

They ought to, he thought. Direct descendants, figuratively if not actually, of the advertising-Hollywood beauty fetish of the previous century, they were selected almost from birth for their callings and trained rigorously from childhood on, the males to become athletes or actors, the females courtesans or actresses.

There was no race among them, for their only standards were beauty and physical fitness, no creed but achievement in their lines of individual entertainment. He caught sight of a lissome Euro-African, the classic exoticism of her flower-petal face illumined by joyous laughter beneath a glossy neo-Watusi hairdo, as she glided gracefully over the dance-floor in the arms of a hunch-harnessed and bespectacled partner.

The gladiators and courtesans alone seemed to find joy in living. Lindsay, who had seldom been unhappy in his active existence, felt his sympathies and heart go out to them. He followed the progress of a tiny Oriental model whose face was alive with good-humor as she swept past his table, her exquisite figure stressed by a glittering jeweled sheathe.

"You really should wear glasses—or else learn not to stare," said Maria, appearing from nowhere and sitting down at the table. She made amends by extending a warm soft hand to grip one of his. Though she wore her glasses and her hair was severely pulled back, he had no difficulty in recalling the fact that, unclothed, she was lovely.

"Why don't you get in on the act?" he suggested, nodding toward a pair of models emerging from the harmopan room. "All you'd have to do would be to remove your specs and harness and let your hair down."

"You're sweet, Zale," she said, pleased. Then, with a sigh, "But there's a lot more to it than that."

"You do all right that way too," he told her boldly.

She slapped the back of his hand and then, growing quickly serious, said, "Zale, I didn't ask you to meet me for that. I've got so much to ask you—so much to tell. Did you really find an assassin waiting for you when you got home last night? And did you kill him?"

"Yes and no," said Lindsay. "I did find one and I didn't kill him. In fact we parted good friends."

"You Martians...." She sighed, then said, "And I understand you have already broken two computers—this afternoon at the psychiatrist's and this evening at the Colosseum. It's the most marvelous news, darling. I've got to know how you did it."

"I'm damned if I know how I fouled up Dr. Craven's computer," he told her, "I'm still trying to figure it out."

Her face fell. She said, "I was hoping you had something.... But never mind." Then, brightening, "But you're driving them crazy. They ran Dr. Craven's results through Elsac late this afternoon and got the same answer. The records checked that you didn't kill your mother and I know you're not an invert." She laughed softly.

Spurred by the erotic atmosphere, plus the dizzying speed of recent events and Maria's nearness, he said, "Let's get out of here and go to my place."

Her hand covered his again atop the table. "I wish we could," she said wistfully. "I like you very much, Zale darling. But this is too important. We haven't time. But what about the tennis tonight? There's going to be an investigation, of course. Won't you tell me how you did it?"

"Not until I've figured out both," he said. "I may be on the track of something or it may be sheer chance. Until I understand what happened at Dr. Craven's I'm simply not sure of my facts."

"But there simply isn't time, darling," Maria told him. "This is really what I must talk to you about. We got word today that President Giovannini is going to unveil Giac any day now."

"Decided against your sabotage plan?" he asked her.

She wrinkled her pert little nose. "What's the use? They'd simply repair it. Besides, it's much too well guarded. Zale, you're our only hope now."

He said "If I'm right, and I'm beginning to hope I am, it won't matter whether Giac is unveiled or not. In fact, it might be more effective if it were."

Maria drummed on the table with nervous knuckles. "But you don't understand, Zale. You don't think for a minute that the Ministry of Computation is taking this lying down. I got word less than half an hour ago that they are preparing to force your recall as an unsuitable plenipotentiary."

"They can try." Lindsay spoke grimly. This was a move he had failed to foresee, though he supposed he should have. Inadvertently he was becoming a major threat to the crockery in the china shop that was Earth.

"They can do it," Maria said simply. "Zale, these people have become absolutely dependent upon their computers. They aren't going to let their entire creed be wrecked by one Martian."

"What do you want me to do?" he asked simply.

"Come with me—now," she said, once more gripping his hand. "A group of us want to talk to you, to find out how you have done it."

He looked at her, found her adorable in her earnestness. He said, "And if I play guinea pig with your friends, then you and I...?"

"Of course—as soon as there's time," she told him.

"You are a little bundle of fanaticism, as well as of sex," he told her. "I should think at least, since you seem to have such an inside track, you could manage to get my recall deferred."

"That's just it!" she exclaimed bitterly. "I see everything, I hear everything—yet I can do nothing. Papa thinks I'm merely a foolish female creature and his attitude blocks me at every turn." Lindsay realized again how fundamentally frustrated she was, wondered if she would ever find a completely satisfactory release.

Lindsay decided to play along. "All right," he said. "Shall we go?"

"Thanks, darling," she promised. "We'd better go separately. There will be a blue copter-cab waiting outside when you leave." She leaned across the table to brush his lips briefly with hers, squeezed his hand and glided off.

He wondered, while he waited for the check, just how foolhardly he was being, allowing himself to be summoned to a meeting of palace conspirators. It could very easily be a trap, whether Maria knew it or not. It could be a ruse to add fuel to the fire being lit under him for his recall as a legate persona non grata on Earth.

"You haven't forgotten our date, have you darling?" The voice was throatily reproachful above him and he looked up in surprise at a glittering female figure, who seemed to be clad entirely in blazing brilliants.

She was tall and blonde, her hair an ocean helmet of gold, sprinkled with gems. Her face was beautifully boned, with broad cheeks and forehead pierced by a decided widow's peak. Light green eyes slanted upward beneath brows like the wings of some tiny graceful bird. Nose, lips and chin gained fascination from the perfection they skirted but just escaped. Face, arms, upper bosom and shoulders wore the even tawny golden tan that only some blondes can achieve.

Her figure, ashimmer with gems, was lithe of waist, firmly full of breast and pelvis, moved with the enticing grace of an Indonesian temple dancer as she slipped into the seat Maria had so recently vacated.

"Sorry, your highness," he said with a look of honest admiration. "I didn't know we had a date."

"We have now," she stated. She laid a handbag solidly encrusted with diamonds, emeralds and rubies on the table, said to the dwarf waiter, "Bring me the usual, Joe—and give Ambassador Lindsay another of whatever he's drinking."

At any other time, Lindsay thought. He said, "I regret this more than you'll ever know, my dear, but I've got a copter-cab waiting for me outside."

"It will keep." The girl pouted prettily, then leaned toward him and said

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Go to page:

Free ebook «The Ambassador by Sam Merwin (most romantic novels .txt) 📖» - read online now

Comments (0)

There are no comments yet. You can be the first!
Add a comment