"Christopher Stasheff - Wizard in Rhyme 03 - The Witch Doctor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stasheff Christopher)

What can you say about a friend who leaves town without telling
you?
I mean, I left Matt sitting there in the coffee shop trying to
translate that gobbledygook parchment of his, and when I came back
after class, he was gone. I asked if anybody'd seen him go, but nobody
had-just that, when they'd looked up, he'd been gone.
That was no big deal, of courser didn't own Matt, and he was a big
boy. If he wanted to go take a hike, that was his business. But he'd
left that damn parchment behind, and ever since he'd found it, he'd
handled it as if it were the crown jewels-so he sure as hell wouldn't
have just left it on the table in a busy coffee shop. Somebody could
have thrown it in the wastebasket without looking. He was just lucky
it was still there when I got back. So I picked it up and put it in my
notebook. "Tell him I've got his parchment," I told Alice.
She nodded without looking up from the coffee she was pouring.
"Sure thing, Saul. If you see him first, tell him he forgot to
pay his bill this morning."
"Saul" is me. Matt claimed I'd been enlightened, so he called me
"Paul." I went along-it was okay as an in-joke, and it was funny the
first time. After that, I suffered through it-from Matt. Not from
anyone else. "Saul" is me. I just keep a wary eye for teenagers with
slingshots who also play harp.
"Will do," I said, and went out the door-but it nagged at me
especially since I had never known Matt to forget to pay Alice
before.
Forget to put on his socks, maybe, but not to pay his tab.
When I got back to my apartment, I took out his mystical
manuscript and looked at it. Matt thought it was parchment, but I
didn't think he was any judge of sheepskins. He certainly hadn't
gotten his.
Well, okay, he had two of them, but they hadn't given him the
third degree yet-and wouldn't, the way he was hung up on that
untranslatable bit of doggerel. Oh, sure, maybe he was right, maybe it
was a long-lost document that would establish his reputation as a
scholar and shoot him up to full professor overnight-but maybe the moon
is made of calcified green cheese, too.
Me, I was working on my second M.A.-anything to justify staying
around campus. Matt had gone on for his doctorate, but I couldn't stay
interested in any one subject that long. They all began to seem kind
of silly, the way the professors were so fanatical about the smallest
details.
By that standard, Matt was a born professor, all right. He just
spun his wheels, trying to translate a parchment that he thought was
six hundred years old but was written in a language nobody had ever
heard of. I looked it over, shook my head, and put it back in the
notebook. He'd show up looking for it sooner or later.
But he didn't. He didn't show up at all.
After a couple of days, I developed a gnawing uncertainty about
his having left town-maybe he had just disappeared. I know, I know, I
was letting my imagination run away with me, but I couldn't squelch the