"Michael Kane - 01 - Warriors Of Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moorcock Michael)

City of the Beast (Warriors of Mars)
Michael Kane Book 1
by Michale Moorcock
Version 1.0


Chapter One

MY DEBT
TO M. CLARCHET

THE Matter Transmitter is both villain and hero of
this story (began Kane), for it took me to a world
where I felt more at home than I shall ever feel
here. It brought me to a wonderful girl whom I
loved and who loved meЧand then took it all away
again.
But I had better begin nearer the beginning.

I was born, as I told you, in OhioЧin Wynns-
villeЧa small, pleasant town that never changed
much. Its only unusual feature was in the person of
M. Clarchet, a Frenchman who had settled there
shortly after the First World War. He lived in a
large place on the outskirts of town. M. Clarchet
was a cosmopolitan, a Frenchman of the old
schoolЧshort, very straight-backed, with a typically
French, waxed moustache and a rather military
way of walking.

To be honest, M. Clarchet was something of a
caricature to us and seemed to illustrate everything
we had learned about the French in our dime
novels and comic books. Yet I owe my life to M.
Clarchet, though I wasn't to realize it until many
years after the old gentleman had passed on, and
when I found myself suddenly transported to Mars
... But again I am getting ahead of myself.

Clarchet was an enigma even to me though, as

boy and youth, I probably knew him better than
anyone else. He had been, he said, a fencing mas-
ter at the Court of the Tsar of Russia before the
Revolution and had had to leave in a hurry when
the Bolsheviks took over.

He had settled in Wynnsville directly because of
this experience. It had seemed to him at the time
that the whole world was in chaos and was being