"Eric Flint - The Thief and the Roller Derby Queen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flint Eric)

Renaissance Chric.
Loretta got out okay due to blind luck. As it happens, the ice fields of Hell are almost frictionless. That's
because the coefficient ofтАФ Never mind. No point going into the physics here. (The kind of people
who'd buy a book like thisтАФI haven't even seen the cover yet, but I'll guarantee it's covered with
half-nekkid women wearing S&M gearтАФwouldn't follow it anyway.) (Oh, sure. Tell me it'll be on the
coffee table when the guests arrive. Along with your leather-bound copy of Kant's Critique of Pure
Reason.)



Like I said, frictionless. Two great roller-derby-queen-type strides into it and she was off her skatesтАФ
wham!тАФright on her ass, sailing across Hell. Loretta steered herself as best she could, using her knee
and elbow pads, but within five minutes she reached the Wall. (Yes, Hell has a boundary. It's flexible, of
course. Depends, any given day or night, on the precise equation between damned souls and saved souls
but, again, we'll skip the math. See reasoning above.)



She hit the Wall feetfirst. Anybody else would have broken their ankles. But Loretta was a roller derby
queen, and she knew just how to handle collisions. Next thing you know, she was skating up the Wall
making her getaway. (Gravity works differently in Hell. Just trust me.) The Wall is infinite, of course, but
she was saved by divine intervention. Once she got high enough to be noticed, an angel came and took
her back home. Sports fan, he claimed, even though Loretta thought he was a regular in the club where
she did her dancing, hiding his face at one of the back tables along with all the televangelists. Maybe not.



For the thief, on the other hand, things didn't go as well. At first, he was full of confidence. He always
liked to brag to his friends that he'd never been caught. His friends always said that was because he never
managed to actually steal much of anything. And it was true that he was better at the getaway part of the
job than he was at the actual getting. (Which, when you think about it, kind of defeats the whole purpose
of being a thief in the first place, but he was never smart enough to figure that out.)



The thief took one look at Loretta flying off and decided to try a different route. So he plunged into a
snowdrift. Bright guy, like I said.



Soon enough, the thief was floundering around in the snow, freezing his ass off. He didn't get far, of
course. After they finished gorging themselves on the calimari, the imps set off in hot pursuit. They had no
trouble tracking him. They didn't even bother following his footsteps, they just followed the smell of
suntan lotion. Imps know exactly what sun block smells like, because all surfers go to Hell.



(Yes, all of them. It's not that God has anything in particular against the sport. It's just that He hates the
music of the Beach Boys, and He tends to overreact.)