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

busts to-ah-show the shape of the chins. With the beards they'd all
look too much alike."
"Is that the reason? They might say so on the labels." The
gnarly man rubbed his own chin, such as it was. "I wish beards would
come back into style. I look much more human with a beard. I got
along fine in the Sixteenth Century when everybody had whiskers.
"That's one of the ways I remember when things happened, by the
haircuts and whiskers that people had. I remember when a wagon I was
driving in Milan lost a wheel and spilled flour bags from hell to
breakfast. That must have been in the Sixteenth Century, before I
went to Ireland, because I remember that most of the men in the crowd
that collected had beards. Now-wait a minute-
maybe that was the Fourteenth. There were a lot of beards then too."
"Why, why didn't you keep a diary?" asked McGannon with a groan
of exasperation.
The gnarly man shrugged characteristically. aAnd pack around
six trunks full of paper every time I moved? No, thanks."
"I-ah-don't suppose you could give me the real story of Richard
III and the princes in the Tower?"
"Why should I? I was just a poor blacksmith or farmer or
something most of the time. I didn't go around with the big shots. I
gave up all my ideas of ambition a long time before that. I had to,
being so different from other people. As far as I can remember, the
only real king I ever got a good look at was Charlemagne, when he
made a speech in Paris one day. He was just a big tall man with Santa
Claus whiskers and a squeaky voice."

Next morning McGannon and the gnarly man had a session with
Svedberg at the Museum, after which McGannon drove Gaffney around to
the lawyer's office, on the third floor of a seedy old office
building in the West Fifties. James Robinette looked something like a
movie actor and something like a chipmunk. He glanced at his watch
and said to McGannon: "This won't take long. If you'd like to stick
around I'd be glad to have lunch with you." The fact was that he was
feeling just a trifle queasy about being left with this damn queer
client, this circus freak or whatever he was, with his barrel body
and his funny slow drawl.
When the business had been completed, and the gnarly man had
gone off with his manager to wind up his affairs at Coney, Robinette
said, "Whew! I thought he was a halfwit, from his looks. But there
was nothing halfwitted about the way he went over those clauses.
You'd have thought the damn contract was for building a subway
system. What is he, anyhow?"
McGannon told him what he knew.
The lawyer's eyebrows went up. "Do you believe his yarn?"
"I do. So does Saddler. So does Svedberg up at the Museum.
They're both topnotchers in their respective fields. Saddler and I
have interviewed him, and Svedberg's examined him physically. But
it's just opinion. Fred Blue still swears it's a hoax or a case of
some sort of dementia. Neither of us can prove anything."