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

first book's vast proceeds to get a nose-job, to root hair on his no-longer-cueball noggin, and he had
raised a mustache!
I stood there staring at that picture, and I groaned. Mark Ventnor no longer bore the faintest
resemblance to my Easter Island caricatures.

I didn't just nurse my wounds. I planned and plotted, again. I worked it all out carefully, and I admit
to feeling like a genius.
We're all afflictedтАФor blessedтАФwith it at one time or another. This plan I even talked over with Ben
Corrick; we were friends now, and allies.
I went back again.
Back, this time, to 1816. A bit of jockeying: June, 1816. A bit more: Switzerland, June 15, 1816. I
hid the veedub pretty damned cleverly, I thought, and reached my destination in the midst of a cold nasty
rain that I knew would continue for several days. And I knocked at a door, the door of the Maison
Chappuis. Out back, I knew, was a vineyard and, about fifteen minutes' stroll away, the Villa Diodati.
Naturally they had to take me in. I was obviously what passed for a gentleman in those days, and just
as obviously a stranger in a strange land, not to mention of passing intelligenceтАФand wetly bedraggled,
and hungry. They were all there: Mary, Claire, George, Percy, and John. Claire, Mary's half-sister and
George's mistress, obviously wished we'd all bug off and leave her and her lover alone so they could
continue the relationship they'd begun in England.
We didn't. We talked constantly. (George kept writing down pieces of a long heroic poem he was
working on and stuffing them into his pockets. I wondered if he'd ever get all that fire-starter sorted out
and pieced together.)
Mary was a shy girl (yeah, you female sexists, girl; she was nineteen) who was manifestly content to
listen to the rest of us. She exhibited the presence of a good brain though, and was well-read. Her
husband and his friend were fervently interested in modern scienceтАФthat is, what was modern then, and
passed for science. Galvanism, for instance. No, no, not galvanizing. Galvanism, after Luigi Galvani,
who'd died only eighteen years before. He had serendipitously discovered what he was to call "animal
electricity," and learned how to create a metallic arc that caused the muscles of frogs' legs to contract so
that they twitched.



The new discipline was still called "galvanism," although by the time of my visit to Maison Chappuis,
Alessandro Volta had slipped paper soaked in salt-water between alternating plates of copper and zinc,
and had been proclaimed a count by Napoleon, who also hung a gold medal on him.
"The point is," George said, gesturing with his glass of sherry, "that galvanism appears to enliven the
limbs of the deceased. Now, might it not be possible, as some say, to impart life to the entire organism by
the same means?"
John, whose father had been a countryman of both Volta and Galvani, smiled, obviously making a
small effort not to sneer. "George seeks little, friend Moss; he would but revive the dead, you see."
I sighed. "I agree that it seems not too likely," I admitted. "That a body can be made to jerk does not
necessarily mean that it possesses life. Though perhaps in future, with more knowledge and more
sophisticated machinery, electricity may provide means for, ah, treating sudden death."
"Dear God," said Percy the atheist, "what a phrase!"
"What a phrase, indeed," John said. "And you actually believe that someday the dead might be raised
by men of medicineтАФusing these lightning-tools of Volta and GalvaniтАФoh, and the American,
Franken?"
"Franklin," I muttered, noting how Mary was sitting forward in a tense posture of concentration.
"Perhaps, Doctor. Certainly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our simple
philosophies ... and what it pleases us to call science. Meanwhile . . . it would seem the only means at