Hulk by Peter David (e reader manga TXT) 📕

laugh, Sitwell said, “They pay me to listen in on people, Mr. Talbot, not to figure out why people do what they do. So I never gave it much thought.”

“It’s very simple,” Talbot told him. “We want to see what happens if Banner gets upset, as per the files his father kept on him. But Brucie keeps himself wrapped too tight. So we needed someone to get under his skin to get to him. And believe me, Sitwell, nobody, but nobody, can get under your skin quite like Betty Ross.”

“I’ll kill her,” growled Thunderbolt Ross, pacing his office. “No, on second thought, I’ll kill Talbot. No, on third thought, I’ll kill both of them. Save me time.”

Lieber stood there and watched the general move from one side of the office to the other without breaking stride. “Begging the general’s pardon, but why is Atheon’s interest in Lawrence Berkeley labs in any way the fault of the general’s daughter?”

“Because Atheon’s up to something, Lieber,” Ross said sharply. “Supposedly we all work for the same people, but something’s going on. I know it. And I’m having trouble thinking about it dispassionately because my daughter’s involved. If she hadn’t gone to work for those damned people, I wouldn’t have this problem!”

“But didn’t she used to date Talbot? Wouldn’t it be worse if she were married to him by now?”

Ross glared at him. “I don’t recall asking you to provide worst-case scenarios, Lieber. Dismissed.” Lieber tossed off a salute, which Ross quickly returned, and then quickly departed the office, leaving Ross to stew in his own annoyance and frustration.

Well, at least Talbot would be along shortly, and perhaps they could get this whole thing cleared up. Because if they didn’t, then there would be hell to pay, and Thunderbolt Ross intended to be standing there collecting the tolls.

in dreams, the

knowledge he seeks

are memories he

cannot grasp

Once Bruce Krenzler reached his house, he parked his bike and limped inside. He considered sliding into a bath and soaking his aching legs, but his mind couldn’t stop racing. He knew in a vague way that he was hungry, and the only reason he became at all aware that he had made himself dinner was because at one point—while tending a small Zen moss garden atop his makeshift desk—he suddenly realized that his stomach was full.

He put down the gardening tools, walked into the kitchen, and found an empty tray from a frozen dinner in the garbage can. Granted, a frozen dinner wasn’t the most memorable of suppers, but even so he couldn’t help but think he shouldn’t be so much in a world of his own that he would completely forget making and eating dinner within moments of having done so.

Then, as problems he’d been having with an equation suddenly presented themselves with possible answers, he pushed thoughts of his absentmindedness out of his brain. Within five minutes, he was back to wondering why he was no longer hungry, but was so busy scribbling figures, calculations, sketches, and DNA sequences onto scratch pads that he stopped thinking about it altogether.

After a while Bruce got up and stretched, scratching absently under his chin and wondering how long he’d been working. He’d gotten home around seven or so, and been at it . . . what? An hour? Two at most? He glanced at a clock, rubbed his eyes in order to clear them, and looked again. And the clock said the same time it had an instant before: 2:27 A.M., the numbers and letters of the digital readout glowing in the dimness.

Had time flown by that quickly? Was it possible?

Well, it didn’t really matter if it was possible or not; it had, so there was no point in debating the possibilities of it. He stretched his arms, yawned, shook out the cramped muscles of his legs, and moved to the window.

One of the things Bruce had gotten used to about himself—indeed, one of his strengths as a scientist—was his ability to see patterns in everything around him. Sometimes they were utterly pointless: mundane digits in a checking account number that recombined, or sequences of letters drawn from various sources that spelled out something. At other times the result would be sudden bursts of insight that invariably led to a flurry of activity that might or might not lead to a new and even more interesting breakthrough. Betty likened the ability to that of the protagonist from that movie about the mathematician who developed psychotic behavior, a comparison that didn’t exactly thrill Bruce.

So it didn’t surprise Bruce at all when, while staring out at a willow tree illuminated by a street lamp, the shadows and branches of the tree seemed to form an intricate latticework of shapes and patterns. It was like nature was giving him a Rorschach inkblot test. The shapes kept changing as the wind blew: one moment they were octopus tentacles writhing through a sea of air, now they were long fingers interlacing like the hands of a silent film villain, who was rubbing his hands together in gleeful anticipation of his malevolent plan reaching fruition.

And now they looked like a stairway, and now they looked like two interlocking faces of . . . of . . .

He stared and stared, and continued to stare, and even though the branches moved a dozen times more, the image they had formed just a bit earlier remained in Bruce’s brain, frozen there like a gray-cell snapshot. Two faces, ensnared in each other, but they weren’t human faces. They were like—like a pair of animals. Animals that were . . .

An association floated through his mind, and almost escaped unmolested, but then he snagged it and pulled it down to him, and the thought came to him: stuffed toys.

Yes. That was it. The shadow imagery had born a resemblance to a couple of stuffed toys. But what kind of toys they were precisely, and whose they were, he couldn’t say. He