"Matthew Hughes - A Herd of Opportunity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Matt)

"It's unheard of," Bandar said. "It would be,"--he swallowed, throat suddenly dry--"a new datum."

Huffley's face twitched. The old man seemed torn between joyous excitement and stark terror and
Bandar thought the mix appropriate to the situation. No one had contributed a new datum to the
Institute's vast compendium of knowledge since time immemorial.

The two scholars had stopped to contemplate the enormity of the prospect. Now a rotund man, who
wore a remarkable hat and smelled strongly of the devastating liquor known as Red Abandon, stumbled
into them and caromed away. They resumed their progress toward the Hotel Splendor.

"So we are not here to solve the hydromants' problem, though it was that expectation that led them to
pay our passage?"

"The search for knowledge sometimes requires a scholar to make bold leaps," said Huffley. "Do you
imagine the first explorers of the Commons paused to quibble and cavil over every little detail?"

"I imagine they risked their own identities, not the wealth of others," said Bandar.

The preceptor threw his student a look that carried unmixed sentiments and Bandar subsided. Instead he
indicated the shambles around them and said, "How did all this arrive?"

Huffley told him that after the Bololos had come and gone three years running, news of their odd antics
reached the distant mining town of Haplick where a boom built around the discovery of surface deposits
of odlerite was beginning to fade. The impresario Rul Bazwan, a man as long on enterprise as he was
short on qualms, operated there, supplying miners with the services they craved in their off-time: ardent
liquors, games of chance, and compliant companions. His receipts beginning to decline, Bazwan was
casting about for a new place in which to pitch up, and fearing that he would be put to the expense of
moving his troupe offworld. Then the Bololos offered opportunity.

"He sent men to harvest lichens at the next point on the creatures' migratory circuit, delivering the stuff to
feeding stations he established in a natural amphitheater not far from here. The Bololos, their fodder at
hand, did not move on. Near the food Bazwan left heaps of costumes and theatrical props. The Bololos,
their psyches contaminated by the contents of the human unconscious, took them up and began to act out
myths and archetypical situations.

"Bazwan takes tourists out to gawk for free as the poor things strut and fret," Huffley continued. "He
profits when the punters return to his establishment for wine, whoopitude, and song. His enterprise is
popular among the jaded. They now come here even from other worlds, as do disreputable hangers-on
who feed dissolute appetites. A town has sprung up and the noise is a sore trial to the sequestrants."

Huffley's soft hands met and parted in a gesture that expressed resignation at the misfortunes of others.
"But it is an unheard of opportunity for two scholars of the Institute."
****
The Institute of Historical Inquiry had been established in the city of Olkney on Old Earth scores, some
said hundreds, of thousands of years ago, to explore and map the human collective unconscious. Through
a mastery of recondite mentalist techniques, the founding scholars of the Institute had learned to delve
beneath their individual, personal unconsciousnesses and enter that vast nosphere resident within all
humanity, where resided the eternal archetypes of the species: the Fool and the Hero, the Mother and
Father, the Wise Man and the Helpful Beast, the Deliverer and the Devourer, and many more. Here, too,