"Fritz Leiber - The Big Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

had that dead blank look it must have had when every double eagle he owned and more he
didn't were riding on the next card to be turned in the gambling saloon on one of those
wedding-cake Mississippi steamboats.
Doc was soused as usual, sitting at the bar with his top hat pushed back and his
knitted shawl pulled around him, his wide eyes seeing whatever horrors a life in Nazi-
occupied Czarist Russia can add to being a drunk Demon in the Change World.
Maud, who is the Old Girl, and Lili--the New Girl, of course--were telling the big
heads of their identical pearl necklaces.
You might say that all us Entertainers were a bit edgy; being Demons doesn't
automatically make us brave.
Then the red telltale on the Major Maintainer went out and the Door began to darken
in the Void facing Sid and Beau, and I felt Change Winds blowing hard and my heart missed
a couple of beats, and the next thing three Soldiers had stepped out of the cosmos and into the
Place, their first three steps hitting the floor hard as they changed times and weights.
They were dressed as officers of hussars, as we'd been advised, and--praise the Bonny
Dew!--I saw that the first of them was Erich, my own dear little commandant, the pride of the
von Hohenwalds and the Terror of the Snakes. Behind him was some hard-faced Roman or
other, and beside Reich and shouldering into him as they stamped forward was a new boy,
blond, with a face like a Greek god who's just been touring a Christian hell.
They were uniformed exactly alike in black--shakos, furedged pelisses, boots, and so
forth--with white skull emblems on the shakos. The only difference between them was that
Erich had a Caller on his wrist and the New Boy had a black-gauntleted glove on his left hand
and was clenching the mate in it, his right hand being bare like both of Erich's and the
Roman's.
"You've made it, lads, hearts of gold," Ski boomed at them, and Beau twitched a
smile and murmured something courtly and Maud began to chant, "Shut the Door!" and the
New Girl copied her and I joined in because the Change Winds do blow like crazy when the
Door is open, even though it can't ever be shut tight enough to keep them from leaking
through.
"Shut it before it blows wrinides in our faces," Maud called in her gamin voice to
break the ice, looking like a skinny teen-ager in the tight, kneelength frock she'd copied from
the New Girl
But the three Soldiers weren't paying attention. The Roman--I remembered his name
was Mark-- was blundering forward stiffly as if there were something wrong with his eyes,
while Erich and the New Boy were yelling at each other about a kid and Einstein and a
summer palace and a bloody glove and the Snakes having booby-trapped Saint Petersburg.
Erich had that taut sadistic smile he gets when he wants to hit me.
The New Boy was in a tearing rage. "Why'd you pull us out so bloody fast? We fair
chewed the Nevsky Prospekt to pieces galloping away."
"Didn't you feel their stun guns, _Dummkopf_, when, they sprung the trap--too soon,
_Gott sei Dank?_" Erich demanded.
"I did," the New Boy told him. "Not enough to numb a cat. Why didn't you show us
action?"
"Shut up. I'm your leader. I'll show you action enough."
"You won't. You're a filthy Nazi coward."
"_Weibischer Englander!_"
"_Schlange!_"
The blond lad knew enough German to understand that last crack. He threw back his
sable-edged pelisse to clear his sword arm and he swung away from Erich, which bumped
him into Beau. At the first sign of the quarrel, Beau had raised himself from the divan as