"Robert Rankin - The Greatest Show Off Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rankin Robert)

'Yes please.'
'Me too. But I only have tea.'
Inside his allotment hut, Raymond uncorked his Thermos flask and poured out two
piping-hot cups of tea. One with sugar and one without. 'I wish it were coffee' he said in a
sorrowful tone. `I have never cared for tea'.
'You should ask you mum to make up coffee for you, instead of tea then.'
'If only it was that easy.' Raymond sighed. 'But I always make up the flask myself.'
Simon sipped at the tea that was offered him. 'I am baffled by the Thermos flask,' he
said between sippings.
'How so?'
'Well, you put something hot into it and it stays hot; And you put something cold into
it and it stays cold.'
Raymond nodded thoughtfully.
'Well. How does it know?
Raymond grinned the smile that he'd got on the National Health and did his best to
explain the situation. 'It doesn't actually know as such. You see the Thermos flask consists of
two glass bottles, one inside the other. And between these two bottles there is a quarter of an
inch of vacuum. And heat cannot travel through a vacuum.'
'Get away,' said Simon. 'So heat can't travel through a vacuum?'
'You have it.'
Simon scratched at his fine dark head of hair. "Then tell me this: if heat cannot travel
through a quarter of an inch of vacuum, how can the heat from the sun travel through ninety-
six million miles of vacuum and reach the earth?'
Raymond peered into the steaming glass throat of his Thermos flask. 'Perhaps it does
know after all,' he whispered in an awestruck kind of a tone.
'Makes you think,' said Simon. 'What is that terrible smell, by the way?'
Raymond sniffed. 'You have trodden in dog pooh again, I suppose.'
'No, not that smell.'
Raymond sniffed again. 'It smells like fish. Have you trodden in fish?'
'Don't be a schmuck,' said Simon, who had come across the word in his dictionary
while looking up 'tectonic', and had been hoping for an opportunity to use it.
Raymond was about to ask the meaning of the word 'schmuck', when the sound of a
terrific detonation, coming from very near by, caused him instead to drop his Thermos flask
and take a dive for cover.
'Whatever was that?' asked Simon, joining him at floor altitude. 'Are we at war?'
'No, we're still friends.' Raymond rolled on to his back and struck his head on half a
bag of solid cement. 'Go out and see what's happened.'
Simon felt at his teeth. 'Would you do that if you were me?'
There was a second detonation, somewhat louder and nearer than the first.
'Run!' cried Raymond, leaping to his feet.
There was a good deal of undignified struggling and fighting as the two young men
sought their escape through the narrow doorway. But when it was over and done with and
they emerged, puffing and panting back into the warm spring evening, one thing was
immediately apparent to them. And that one thing was, that nothing whatsoever appeared to
have changed upon the allotments.
'I see no shell holes,' said Simon, straightening his hair and dusting down his manly
denims. 'Nor any holes at all for that matter.'
'I have many down my lane,' said Raymond. 'But they are not my responsibility. I
wonder what made those loud bangs.'
'Have you ever heard of The Barisal Guns?'