"Andrew J. Offutt - Gone With the Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Offutt Andrew J)

man with a stick in his hand, belching fire, and with a great dark mark carefully traced out on his
shoulder.)
It was work, but I had accepted the task and it was a fascinating job and even sort of fun. Feeling
like poor overworked Herakles (he was a blond, by the way, with ridiculously big feet), I repeated this
labor-organizing among other tribes, widely separated from the first. I even took one headman's daughter
for a time-jump, which she didn't appreciate overmuch. But she was returned to her people happy.
 My next jump was a long one, forward, and I had to bounce three times to get to the right time and
place. That was some big river, in those days. These people were advanced, and those bronze swords
and the faces behind them looked nasty. But I got myself conveyed to their king, without having to kill or
maim, and we "talked." His wife also made eyes at me. Unfortunately she looked just like him; his sister, I
assumed.
A lot of short-period bouncing around in time followed. He provided the slaves; the electron "gun"
and the thermal drill easily carved out hugeтАФI mean H*U*G*E blocks of stone. The veedub transported
them to the appointed place in no time, if you'll pardon the expression. All the slaves had to do was
shove those megatherian building blocks onto the veedub's runners; it and I took over from there.
Piling them up in the proper form and shape was up to them and their ugly king, who was crazy about
the whole idea. I provided a few instructions and suggestions, even diagrams (on clay tablets and
papyrus, both of which I knew would never survive the centuries). Thus I started those Egyptians and
their megalomanic king off on a nice project: the Great Pyramid. I think they did very nicely with it.
So did the Incas and Aztecs I started on the same project a few days (and several thousand years)
later. In Peru, Mexico, and Ecuador I picked up some perfectly lovely groupies of both sexes, though I
assured them I suffered from a hopeless heterosexual hangup. I'd had a vasectomy long ago; it seemed
the thing to do. Now I was gladтАФHarvey Moss simply could not afford to have any Inca or Aztec
offspring!
I did several other things, in several other times and places, but I think I've given the general flavor
and manner of it. And then, with a lot of hair and a quite respectable beard, I returned to hometime, with
more projects to my credit than Frank Lloyd Wright or even FDR ever envisioned.

I spent the next two months collecting and collating material on my activities from articles in
newspapers, scientific and popular journals and worse; the range was from the Washington Post and the
Louisville Courier-Journal to The Morehead News and the L.A. Free Press; from the Smithsonian
through Escapade and "specialized" journals such as Fate magazine. I said material on my activities.
Right. Except that none of the writers knew that the strange finds were my works. I was at first surprised
to discover a lot of things I hadn't put there. But I smiled, realizing that IтАФcarrying out the weird
genius-plan of Marcus D. Ventnor тАФhad fostered much of what we now call spinoffs.
That required two months, as I said. Then I wrote the book, with photographs. (Oh, they're
excellent! Most of them I took on location while time-tripping. They are for the most part extraordinarily
clear.) The actual writing of the book was the tedious part; writing that damned manuscript took three
long weeks, man, and four more to edit and type it up pretty. Good writing, as Snoopy once observed, is
hard work.
I didn't have to worry about finding a publisher; Ventnor was waiting for the ms. with glowing eyes
and dangling tongue. He rushed it into print, the bastard, using not the name I'd used as authorтАФmy own,
for a changeтАФbut the French pen name you now know so well, Andre de Vrees. I dragged out our
contractтАФand learned that I'd been a lot more excited about the advance and the prospect of my
extended tripping into the past than ever-shrewd Ventnor. No wonder the advance had been so fat! It
wasn't an advance against royalties at all; it was the sale price. Just as he owned the temporal traverser,
Ventnor owned my book, totally.
You know what came of it. The book made a mint. Ventnor and the (invisible!) writer were hailed,
kudoed, attacked, castigated. It was a work of genius; it was charlatanry. It was the discovery of the
age; it was the work of the Anti-god.