"Simon Hawke - Sorcerer 2 - The Inadequate Adept" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawke Simon)

show up for his weddings. It wasn't that Brewster was gun-shy about marriage, it was simply that he
couldn't seem to keep his mind on little things like weddings when he was on the verge of perfecting the
greatest scientific discovery the world had ever seen. Assuming, of course, the world would ever get a
chance to see it. And therein lies our tale.

For those of you who were thoughtless enough to miss our first installment (The Reluctant Sorcerer,
Warner Books), never fear, your faithful narrator will bring you up to date. The rest of you, hang in there
while we wait for the late arrivals to catch up. Or simply skip ahead to the next chapter. It's okay, I don't
mind.

What Brewster had constructed in his top-secret laboratory, high atop the corporate headquarters
building of EnGulfCo International, was the world's first working model of a time machine. We'll skip the
details of how he did it, because that was covered in our first episode (The Reluctant Sorcerer, Warner
Books), aside from which, explaining time travel always gives your narrator a frightful headache. Suffice it
to say that the thing worked, which should have assured Brewster's fame and fortune and made him as
much of a household name as, say, Gene Roddenberry, or maybe even Isaac Asimov, except for one,
minor, little problem....

Brewster lost it. That's right, the time machine. He lost it. How do you lose something the size of a small
helicopter? (Yes, that's how big it was, and if you'd read our first episode-The Reluctant Sorcerer,
Warner Books-you'd have known that already.) Well, it had to do with a faulty counter in a timing switch
that was part of the auto-return module. It's really rather complicated, but if you've ever owned a British
sports car, then you'll understand how little things like that can really screw up the whole works.

As a result of this malfunction, Brewster accidentally sent his time machine off on a one-way trip. To get
it back, he had to build a second time machine, go back in time with it and find the first one... well, you
get the idea. It seemed simple and straightforward enough. So Brewster built a second time machine and
that was when his trouble really started.

Due to some kind of freak temporal version of an atmospheric skip (either that, or the bizarre
machinations of the plot), Brewster wound up in a parallel universe that suspiciously resembled the setting
of a fantasy novel. And since he'd crash-landed his second time machine, Brewster was stuck there, with
only one chance to make it back. Unless he could find the first time machine he'd built, there was no way
for him to get back home again. Unfortunately, the first time machine was nowhere to be found.

(The reason it was nowhere to be found: three brigands had found it in the Redwood Forest and sold
it to a nearby sorcerer, who managed to stumble onto a spell that tapped into its energy field.) However,
the time machine was not designed to be operated by magical remote control, and as a result, it hadn't
functioned quite the way it was supposed to.

There was a temporal phase loop, or maybe a short circuit, and the sorcerer disappeared, while the time
machine remained exactly where it was. When the sorcerer did not return, his frightened apprentice took
this mysterious and terrible device to Warrick Morgannan, the most powerful wizard in all the
twenty-seven kingdoms, and the bane of your faithful narrator's existence.

"What?" said Warrick, glancing up from his vellum tomes and scrolls.

Nothing. Go back to work.

Warrick scowled and went back to his paperwork again while Teddy the Troll continued to sweep the