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

Administration.
But somehow Ventnor succumbed. Somehow Corrick persuaded and convinced him to check out
the temporal traverser, at least. And so Mark Ventnor, actually giving consideration to parting (after due
tearfulness and lectures) with ten thousand clams, told Corrick to hold tight. And Mark called in Harvey
Moss.
Me.
I'm a writer. It's all I do. I make a living at it and from it. There are several ways that can be done.
You can write a book about a garbage-eating bird with a sixth-grade philosophy, for instance, and be
rich forever because that's one grade above Reader's Digest readers, who are easily impressed. Or do a
sort of fact novel about a couple convicted murderers, and be rich and drop names forever. Or you can
write science fiction, and stay hungry. You can perpetrate Gothics for whoever it is that reads them, and
know that every word you write will sell, instantly and easily.
Or you can do what I do. I make a nice comfortable living the same way the A&P does: on volume.
I write a lot, and I've never been late for a contract deadline. Fifty-seven books for Ventnor in the last six
years, as I said, and all on time. Dependable, that's me. Always dependable; a pussycat. And always
hungry. Oh, I admit it: I have the usual booze 'n' broads habit. Sure, writers get groupies; writing's almost
show biz, you know. And we have to get down at the end of a day, after hyping up on ideas and coffee
all day. SoтАФbroads and booze, right? It cuts into the old finances.
I've also written some decent science fiction, and I read pure science articles just as Mark said,
constantly. Presumably, then, I know a few things. Certainly to a guy like Mark Ventnor, who knows
very few.

So he called to sic me onto Corrick. To study his notes and his schematics and to look at the Thing in
the garage behind his Chinchilla, Pennsylvania cottage, and to make a judgment, and to report back to
Daddy Warbucks Ventnor in Manhattan. He would then decide whether to risk ten of his thousands on
Corrick's alleged temporal traverser.
Flattering? I guess so; Mark trusted me and my knowledge. Also a drag. After allтАФa time
machine! Didn't John Campbell prove the total impossibility of time travel?
But ... maybe, I thought, there was a science-fiction idea in it, and that would beat having to do the
damned Gothic, since I'd written only one book in the past five weeks. I was in great need of something
to do a book about, and Gothics are icky, and writing pornography always makes me so damned horny!
So I journeyed to the town of Chinchilla, Pennsylvania to meet a kook named Corrick, Benjamin A.,
PhD, and listen to his nonsense, and tell Mark Ventnor what he should have known to do in the first
place: save his ten thousand. Or give it to me as an advance to go and interview Clifford Oiving.
But that wasn't the way it turned out.
First I met Dr. Ben Corrick, who was a "call-me-Ben" sort of guy you couldn't dislike if you tried.
About Ventnor's age, with hair, less weight, more wrinkles. Somehow he managed to look baggy and
wrinkly and rumpled even in doubleknitsтАФthe trousers pockets stuffed so full of this and that they
resembled army fatigues. Quite a bit of reddish hair, curly, above a high forehead that was obviously a lot
higher than when he and Mark Ventnor had been fraternal brethren together. His blue eyes were of the
sort usually called watery, set in a pleasant-enough face, almost a boy's face.
He was the sort of man you liked the moment you saw him. I had to remind myself to maintain a
scientific attitude, to treat him not as a friend but as a charlatan.
But he wasn't. I studied, I pored, I re-studied and asked questions. Examined and re-examined the
stuff in the garage. The temporal traverser, he called it.
And so did I, finally. I said so, to Mark Ventnor. He acted incredulous, but his delight and excitement
glowed through the careful, questioning attitude like the sun through closed venetian blinds.
With Corrick practically having signed away his birthright (not to mention his burial plot, thus
including his deathright as well), Mark Ventnor financed the project he dubbed Project Fugit. And time
fled, while Ben Corrick worked away at finishing his brain-baby and while Mark Ventnor worked away