"L. Sprague De Camp - The Gnarly Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

THE GNARLY MAN



DR. MATILDA SADDLER first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June ~
4th, 1g~6, at Coney Island. The spring meeting of the Eastern Section
of the American Anthropological Association had broken up, and Dr.
Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue
of Columbia and Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never
visited Coney and meant to go there that evening. She urged Blue and
Jeff cott to come along, but they begged off.
Watching Dr. Saddler's retreating back, Blue of Columbia
crackled: "The Wild Woman from Wichita. Wonder if she's hunting
another husband?" He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a
who-the-Hell-are-you-Sir expression.
"How many has she had?" asked Jeff cott of Yale.
"Three to date. Don't know why anthropologists lead the most
disorderly private lives of any scientists. Must be that they study
the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and ask
themselves, 'If the Eskimos can do it why can't we?' I'm old enough
to be safe, thank God."
"I'm not afraid of her," said Jeffcott. He was in his early
forties and looked like a farmer uneasy in store-bought clothes. aI~m
so very thoroughly married."
"Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she
was there. It wasn't safe to walk across the campus, with Tuthill
chasing all the females and Saddler all the males."~

Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the
adolescents who infest the platform of the B.M.T.'s Stillwell Avenue
Station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth, possibly
excepting the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. She didn't
much mind. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her late thirties,
who had been kept in trim by the outdoor rigors of her profession.
Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift's paper on occulturation
among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.
Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at
the concessions without trying them, preferring to watch the human
types that did and the other human types that took their money. She
did try a shooting gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their
perch with a .22 too easy to be much fun. Long-range work with an
army rifle was her idea of shooting.
The concession next to the shooting gallery would have been
called a sideshow if there had been a main show for it to be a
sideshow to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of the
two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider-girl, and
other marvels. The piece de resistance was Ungo-Bungo the ferocious
ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of twenty-seven lives. The
picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in
each hand, while others sought to throw a net over him.