"Keith Laumer - The World Shuffler" - читать интересную книгу автора (Laumer Keith)

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 One
It was a warm autumnal afternoon in Artesia. Lafayette O'Leary, late of the U.S.A.,
now Sir Lafayette O'Leary since his official investiture with knighthood by Princess
Adoranne, was lounging at ease in a brocaded chair in his spacious library, beside a high,
richly draped window overlooking the palace gardens. He was dressed in purple knee
pants, a shirt of heavy white silk, gold-buckled shoes of glove-soft kid. A massive
emerald winked on one finger beside the heavy silver ring bearing the device of the ax
and dragon. A tall, cool drink stood at his elbow. From a battery of speakers concealed
behind the hangings, a Debussy tone poem caressed the air.
O'Leary patted back a yawn and laid aside the book he had been idly leafing through.
It was a thick, leather-bound volume on the Art of Bemusement, packed with fine print
but, alas, deficient in specifics. For three yearsтАФever since Central had relieved a
bothersome probability stress among the continua by transferring him here from Colby
CornersтАФ he had been trying without visible success to regain his short-lived ability to
focus the physical energies, as Professor Doctor Hans Joseph Schimmerkopf had put it in
his massive tome on the Practice of Mesmerism. Now that had been a book you could get
your teeth into, Lafayette reflected ruefully. And he'd only read part of chapter one. What
a pity he hadn't had time to bring it along to Artesia. But things had been rather rushed,
there at the lastтАФand faced with a choice between Mrs. MacGlint's Clean Rooms and
Board and a palace suite with Daphne, who would have hesitated?
Ah, those had been exciting days, Lafayette thought fondly. All those years, back in
Colby Corners, he had suspected that life held more in store for him than the career of a
penniless draftsman, subsisting on sardines and dreams. And then he had run across
Professor Schimmerkopf's massive tome. The prose had been a bit old-fashioned, but the
message was clear: with a little concentration, you could make your dreams come trueтАФ
or at lease seem true. And if by self-hypnosis you could turn your shabby bedroom into a
damask-draped chamber full of perfumed night air and distant musicтАФwhy not try it?
And try it he hadтАФwith astonishing success. He had imagined a quaint old street in a
quaint old townтАФand presto! There he was, surrounded by all the sights and sounds and
smells that rounded out the illusion. Even knowing it was all a self-induced dream hadn't
lessened the marvel of it. And then, when things got rough, he had made another startling
discovery: if it was a dream, he was stuck in it. Artesia was realтАФas real as Colby
Corners. In fact, there were those who could argue that Colby Corners was the dream,
from which he had awakened to find himself back in Artesia, where he really belonged.
Of course, it had taken a while to discover that this was his true spiritual home. For a
while it had appeared that he'd discover the answer to the old question as to whether a
man who dreamed he'd fallen off a cliff would ever wake up. In his case it hadn't been a
cliff, of courseтАФbut that was about the only form of demise he hadn't been threatened
with. First there had been Count Alain's challenge, and the duel from the consequences of