"Robert F. Young - Peeping Tommy" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

PEEPING TOMMY
by ROBERT F. YOUNG
Tommy was rich, idle and fond of practical jokes. But he went a bit too far!

Tommy Taylor? Oh, he's coming along fine. I visited him just the other day. Had a long talk with him.
He'll be as good as new again as soon as they take the bandages off. Funny, how an expression can be
born for the wrong reason, and last for cen-turies .. .
He quit the Club, you know. Said he didn't want any part of it any more. As though the Club had
anything to do with his mis-fortune! To tell the truth, we were dubious about letting him join in the first
place. We're a pretty serious bunch, you know, us fellows at the Yore. Each of us is a specialist in his
own right and not ordinarily inclined to bend elbows with a layman, even a fil-thy-rich layman who can
speak six different languages. But, as Hogglewaite (he specializes in Permian rocks) said, time-travel
costs like hell and we needed the money.
And Tommy didn't mind. Like most playboy-inheritors of late-twentieth century family fortun-es, he
throws $1,000 bills to the winds like rain. Oh, we're going to miss him all right. The more so because,
contrary to our ex-pectations, he never played a single one of his practical jokes on us.
You didn't know he was a prac-tical-joke enthusiast? You can't know very much about him then.
Some menтАФlike myself,тАФlive to tape ancient battles. Some menтАФold Hogglewaite, for instanceтАФlive
to collect Perm-ian rocks. And some menтАФyourself, for instanceтАФlive to pick the brains of people like
me while we're on our coffee break so they can write technical arti-cles for the trade journals. But
Tommy Taylor lives to play practical jokes. Or at least that was his purpose in life up until a few weeks
ago.
At first, he was content to play them on people in the present, and then it occurred to him how much
more fun тАФ and how much easier тАФ it would be to play them on people in the past. That was when he
joined the Yore Club and took out a two-year lease on one of our time-bikes. (The lease has another
two months.)


Up until the time this awful thing happened to him, he was gone most of the time, ped-aling back to
every age you can think of, and playing practical jokes on this past person and that. I'm not defending
him when I say that there are far worse ways for a man to work off his frustrations, and I'm not being
callous either. No one can do anything in the past that, in one sense, he hasn't done already ... which
means that if he hasn't already done it, he won't, and that if he has, he will, whether he wants to or not.
Tommy was merely fulfilling his destiny тАФthat's all. And basically that's all anyone who ever pedals back
to the past is doing.
Anyway, most of Tommy's capers were little more than mis-chievous pranks, and did no real harm to
anyone. Take the time he went back to Charlestown of the night of April 18th, 1775, and hid Paul
Revere's horse. Poor Paul was half out of his mind till he found it, but no perman-ent damage was done.
He still made his historic ride. And then there was the time Tommy put invisible ink in the Continental
Congress' inkwell on the eve of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. John Hancock was fit to
be tiedтАФbut again, no permanent damage was done. The ruse was discovered (though not its author),
the inkwell was emptied and refilled, and the his-toric document was signed.
In addition to being a master of six languages, Tommy Taylor was a master of disguise. If you don't
believe it, take a look at Brueghel the Elder's "The Pea-sant Wedding" sometime. A good reproduction
will do. That's rightтАФTommy's in it. He's the musi-cian in Red (did I mention he's an accomplished
musicianтАФwell, he is)тАФthe one who has the hun-gry look in his eyes and who needs a shave. Brueghl
recorded him perfectly. Photographically, almost. Tommy loves to go to weddingsтАФor at least he did.
Weddings provide ideal situa-tions for practical jokes.
 Some of his more malicious capers, though, I can't quite go along with, even though I realize that
basically he had no free will in any of the things he did. Take the innumerable times he told Balzac's