"Mike Resnick - Encounters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

under control without no help from me, so I'd best be off to seek fame and fortune
elsewhere.тАЭ
I followed him to the stairs, and was just starting to climb up out of the laboratory when I
heard the Baron say, тАЬSo what'swrong with giving her three of them?тАЭ
And then Gustave paused for a moment and said, тАЬNot a damned thing, now that I come to
think of it.тАЭ
I left the two of them plotting out the shape of things to come, and that was the last I ever saw
of Baron Steinmetz and his home-made man ... but I guess they got along pretty well
together, because I did hear a couple of years later of a Romanian burlesque dancer who
had three of what most women generally settle for two of.

2. Doubled and Redoubled
You know how some people are connoisseurs of fine art or rare books or gourmet food?
Well, I seem to have become a connoisseur of jails.
The jailhouse back in Moline, Illinois is kind of a community gathering place on Saturday
nights. The Johannesburg jail is pretty friendly, but the food lacks a little something. The
Cairo jail is noisy and crowded. The Nairobi jail is hot and stuffy. The jail in Beria, over in
Mozambique, is kind of cramped and smells of raw sewage. The Hong Kong jail smells of
dead fish. The jail at Poshan is well-appointed, and the jailor's got a weak spot for games of
chance, but if you can't eat with chopsticks you're out of luck.
But the strangest jail I ever spent a night in was unquestionably the jail in Sylvania, a tiny
kingdom which probably ain't on any map printed in the past half century. It seems they'd built
this particular hoosegow with the thought of filling it to the brim with criminals, but the people
of Sylvania were a pretty law-abiding lot, and although the jail had been standing for seven
years, I was its first customer. The jailor was so glad to have a little company that he moved a
four-poster bed into my cell, and his wife starting fixing me a six-course meal every three
hours.
How I came to be in the Sylvania jail was a matter of some mystery to me, because I was still
bound and determined not to break no laws or otherwise impede my progress toward
constructing my tabernacle and bringing all these degenerate Europeans back to the straight
and narrow path. So when I hit Sylvania, with Baron Steinmetz's money still pretty much
intact, I disdained all games of chance, and instead moseyed over to the Royal Hotel and
ordered up the biggest suite in the house, intent on washing the dust from my body and
grabbing a good night's sleep before I went out looking for donations or shapely female
assistants or whatever else I thought the tabernacle might need.
I probably should have figured something was a little strange when the desk clerk looked at
me with wide, staring eyes, gulped a couple of times, and said that of course I didn't have to
pay for the room, but I make it a point never to look no gift horses in the mouth. And when a
passel of waiters brung up some pheasant under glass and caviar and champagne and
wheeled it into my lounge with compliments of the house, I just assumed they were being
polite to a man of the cloth.
Still, since everyone was being so all-fired nice to me, I decided to test the waters, as it were,
and ask one of the waiters to send up a friendly young Sylvanian lady to help me pass the
long lonely hours of the night. He just took it right in stride and asked me if I preferred blondes
or brunettes or redheads, and I allowed that I was equally fond of all of тАЩem, and about half an
hour later in came one of each.
And just as the four of us were getting to know each other and I was thinking that Sylvania
was about the most hospitable country that I ever did visit, in burst two guys in tuxedos and
two more in military uniforms, and they chased the young ladies out and told me to get
dressed and carted me off to the calaboose without so much as a by-your-leave.