"Roger Zelazny & Robert Sheckley - Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada



Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam

Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the

words "Bantam Books" and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries.Marca Regis-

trada.Bantam Books, 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103.



PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FFG 0987654321




Chapter 1



The bastards were shirking again. And Azzie had just gotten comfortable. He had found a place just the
right distance between the fiery hole in the mid-dle of the Pit and the hoarfrost-covered iron walls which
encircled it.
The walls were kept close to absolute zero by the devil's own air-conditioning system. The central Pit
was hot enough to strip atoms of their electrons, and there were occasional gusts that could melt a
proton.

Not that that much heat or cold was needed. It was over-kill; overharass, actually. Humans, even when
dead and cast into the Pit, have very narrow ranges (speaking on a cosmic scale) of tolerance. Once past
the comfort zone in either di-rection, humans soon lost the ability to discriminate bad from worse. What
good was it subjecting a poor wretch to a million degrees Celsius if it felt the same as a mere five hundred
de-grees? The extremes only tormented the demons and other supernatural creatures who tended the
damned. Supernatural creatures have a far wider range of sensation than humans; mostly to their
discomfort, but sometimes to their exceeding pleasure. But it is not seemly to talk about pleasure in the
Pit.

Hell has more than one Pit, of course. Millions upon mil-lions of people are dead. More are dying every
day. Most of them spend at least some time in the Pit. Obviously, there have to be arrangements to
accommodate them all.

The Pit Azzie served in was called North Discomfort 405. It was one of the oldest, having been put into
service in Bab-ylonian times, when people really knew how to sin. It still bore rusty bas-reliefs of winged