Read Revolution for Free Online Page A

of hypothermia."
    His belt
was having a hard time holding back his gut. The buttons on his shirt weren't
doing too well either. And every time he shifted his weight his chair creaked
like one of its legs was about to snap.
    "You're
the doc," I said. "You would know."
    He raised
one grey eyebrow then shrugged his arms up and down inside his jacket. It was
like his shoulders were balloons trying to blow up inside a bag.
    And that
bag just wasn't big enough.
    "I
did my stint at medical school," he said. "Even psychiatrists like me
have to go through that shit first."
    "Really?"
he said.
    "Really,"
repeated Doc Parrot all beak and no mouth.
    "Anyway,"
he went on, "there's been an application for your extradition. It seems
that you stole a lot of money."
    Yeah,
really? I wanted to say, but I could see this was going nowhere. At least
nowhere I wanted to go.
    "I
wasn't stealing it," I said. "I was using it."
    I
twisted back around and sat facing him full on with my arms on the table.
    "So
what's the difference?" he yawned.
    Pencil
like a flagpole he poked it up and down in the air a few times without looking
at me.
    "Go
on," he said. "My ears might have turned to cloth with this cock and
bull crap, but I'm paid to listen."
    The guy
in the corner just stood there. I couldn't see his eyes for his Pergolides, but
I could see he had a good strong pulse in his neck. For a second I wondered if
I could jump across the table fast enough to grab the docks neck and strangle
his fat neck before I was gunned down.
    "Look,"
I said. "He didn't want the money. She didn't want the money..." but
it was just another pointless waste of words from my side.
    "Either
way it belongs to him or her, but not you," the doc said. "So why did
you take it?"
    "I've
told you!"
    Too
sharp.
    I rubbed
the back of my neck and smeared the sweat through the stubble of the razor cut
they'd given me (procedure – lice or ticks, lime disease, quarantine, green
money virus, whatever. They threw everything at me at the same time they threw
me under the ice-cold Dieldrin shower).
    The doc
sighed like he'd had enough
    "A
lunatic story about fly saucers," he read from his notes, "and a
spaceman from the fifties. Am I right?"
    I think
that was the first time I saw something like a half-smile sneering up the side
of his no-lip face.
    "I
thought you were a psychiatrist," I said.
    I leant
back like I couldn't care and bit a ring of crenulations with an incisor around
the rim of my empty coffee carton.
    "I
am. And lunatics still exist," he said, pen scribbling, head shaking (tut
tut tut I don't know) as his eyebrows scaled the heights of his forehead for
that intellectual bagged fog for brain inside that head of his. "And no
matter what kind of fairytale definitions we give to you poor deluded people,
even in this enlightened day and age, you are still nutcases. So... about this
flying saucer."
    "It's
true!"
    He
didn't even look up when I slammed my hands on the table.
    "If
you get out of your chair one more time it'll be another injection, a stronger
one. And they will keep getting stronger until you cooperate. Now sit
down."
    So I
sat. I obeyed. What else could I do? There were no windows. The only door was
made of steel and that had a tumbler lock on it - all numbers, no key, all very
very secure. There was also, of course, that bruiser in the corner with the repeater
popgun in his claws.
    "Good.
So, Desert Center, what happened there?" he said.
    "It
came down from the sky."
    I sighed
shuffling the empty coffee carton across the table, left hand, right hand. When
what I really wanted to do was smack it at his face.
    "The
spaceman?" he said.
    "The
ship."
    "And
at what time was this?"
    "It
was eleven in the morning. The sky was clear blue, and it just appeared."
    I was
resigned to rote. Monosyllabic if I could get away with it.
    "Out
of nowhere," he tapped his pencil at the pad.
    "Look,
I've said it a million times."
    "Okay,
so what did it look