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

lions on the walls and was listed in the Hell Register of Places of Historical Distinction. But Azzie cared
nothing for serving in a well-known Pit. All he wanted was to get out.

Like all Pits, North Discomfort 405 consisted of a circle of iron walls enclosing an enormous garbage
pit, in the center of which was a hole from which poured exceeding hot fire. Hot coals and burning lava
spat from the hole. The glare was un-remitting. Only full-fledged demons like Azzie were permitted to
wear sunglasses.

And the torments of the damned were accompanied and amplified by music of a sort. Menial imps had
scraped clear a semicircle in the midst of the dense, matted, moldy, and rotten debris. The orchestra was
seated in this semicircle on orange crates. It was composed of inept musicians who had died in the act of
performing. Here in Hell they were forced to play the works of the worst composers ever known. Their
names are not remembered on Earth, but in Hell, where their compositions are played without stop, and
even broadcast on the Kazum circuit, they are famous.

The imps worked away, turning and adjusting the damned on their griddles. The imps, like the ghouls,
liked their people well rotted, and served up marinated in an admixture of vinegar, garlic, anchovy, and
maggoty sausage.

What had pulled Azzie from his repose was that in the sector directly ahead of him, the dead were
stacked only about eight or ten high. Azzie gave up his comfortable (relatively) berth and scrambled
down through rotting eggshells and squashy entrails and chicken heads to the level ground where he
could trample comfortably over the bodies.

"When I said stack 'em high," he told the imps, "I meant a whole lot higher than that."

"But they topple over when we try to stack them any higher!" said the head imp.

"Then get some bracing material to hold them in! I want those piles at least twenty bodies high!"

"Difficult, sir."
Azzie stared. Dared an imp talk back to him? "Do it or join them," he said.

"Yes, sir! Bracing material going right up, sir!" The imp ran off, shouting orders to his work crew.

It had started out as another typical day in one of the Pits of Hell. But it was to change dramatically,
unexpectedly, in another moment. So it is with change! We go about our ac-customed ways with
lowered head and hangdog eye, tired of our accustomed round, sure it will go on forever. Why should it
change when there is no change in sight, no letter, no Federal Express, not even a telephone call
presaging a great event? So you despair, never realizing that your messenger has already been
dispatched, and that hopes are sometimes realized, even in Hell. Indeed, some would say, hopes are
especially realized in Hell, since hope itself is counted by some as one of the diabolic torments. But this
may be an exaggeration of the churchmen who scribble about such things.

Azzie saw that the imps were beginning to perform sat-isfactorily. He only had another two hundred
hours to work on his shift (days in the Pit are long) until he could get his three hours' sleep before
beginning again. He was just about to return to that comfortable - relatively comfortable - spot he had
just abandoned when a messenger came running up.

"Are you the demon in charge of this Pit?"