"Grant Naylor - Better Than Life" - читать интересную книгу автора (Naylor Grant)

It does strange things: moves in strange directions, and at strange speeds.
Don't trust Time.
Time will always get you in the end.
Grant Naylor (Alexandria, 25 bc)



Part One
Game over
ONE
Rimmer sat on the open terrace, in his half-devastated dinner suit of the night before, and gazed down at the
metallic blue time machine, drunkenly parked skew-whiff in the ornamental gardens of the Palace of Versailles.
Breakfasting with him were five of his stag-night companions: John F. Kennedy, Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein,
Louis XVI and Elvis Presley.
'That was a heck of a night,' Kennedy sparkled. 'One heck of a night.' Einstein snorted in agreement, and
continued absently buttering the underside of his tie.
Julius Caesar stumbled through the french windows out on to the terrace with an ice-pack perched on his
head. 'Can anyone tell me,' he asked in faltering English, 'where in Jupiter's name we got this?' He held aloft a large
orange-and-white-striped traffic cone. 'I woke up in bed with it this morning.'
Van Gogh cracked an egg into his tomato juice, and downed it with a shudder. 'It's not a good night,' he
grinned, 'if you don't get a traffic cone.'
'You want that?' Elvis Presley nodded at Rimmer's devilled kidneys, and without waiting for a reply scraped
them on to his already full plate.
A colourless smile trickled across Rimmer's upper lip. 'Avez-vous some, uh, Alka-Seltzer?'.
'One heck of a night,' Kennedy repeated.
And he was right: as bachelor-night parties went, it had been a bit of a cracker.
A flash-frame slammed into Rimmer's brain - a scene from the night before ...
He was standing on a table in a 1922 Chicago speakeasy, dancing the Black Bottom with Frank 'the Enforcer'
Nitty's girlfriend, and complaining for the umpteenth time that his mineral water tasted as if someone had poured three
double vodkas into it.
Then ... Then ... He couldn't remember the order, but they had definitely dropped in on one of Caligula's orgies.
Rimmer must have been fairly drunk by then, because he remembered spending at least twenty minutes trying to chat
up a horse.
At some point they'd been in Ancient Egypt, and Rimmer had lost a tooth trying to give the Sphinx a giant
love-bite ... then someone - Rimmer thought it was Elvis - had suggested a curry. And Rimmer, who hated curries, had
been dragged, complaining, through Time back to India in the days of the Raj, where everyone had ordered a mutton
vindaloo, except for Rimmer who had a cheese omelette served with ludicrously thick chips.
The cry had gone up for more liquor, and Rimmer suggested ... What did he suggest? There was a block, so it
must have been something fairly bad. Some kind of restaurant. They'd crashed a private party, and all the people there
seemed fairly put out when Rimmer and his cronies showed up dancing and singing. There were a dozen or so diners,
all men, all bearded. Rimmer closed his eyes and groaned.
They'd gatecrashed the Last Supper.
What had he done? What had he said? He'd been shouting drunk. 'Private bloody party! Our money's as good
as anyone's!'
Twelve of them had stood up and threatened to punch Rimmer out, but the one who'd remained seated had
told the others to sit down again.
'Do one of your tricks,' Rimmer had insisted. 'Come on, I'm getting married tomorrow. That one with the fish -
it's bril-liant.'
A heck of a night.
Rimmer looked at his real-time watch. 'Well, Louis, me old buckeroo,' he said to the king of France, 'we'd better