"Zelazny, Roger - Bring Me The Head Of Prince Charming" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zelazny Roger)

Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming
By Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley

Scanned by BW-SciFi
Scan date: July, 6th, 2002

BRING ME THE HEAD OF PRINCE CHARMING
A Bantam Book / December 1991

Published simultaneously in hardcover and trade paperback
All rights reserved.
Copyright й 1991 by the Amber Corporation and Robert Sheckley.
Cover art copyright й 1991 by Don Maitz
Interior art copyright й by Larry Elmore.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
For information address: Bantam Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Zelazny, Roger.
Bring me the head of prince charming / Roger Zelazny and Robert Sheckley. p. cm.
ISBN 0-553-07678-7 (bc) -ISBN 0-553-35448-5 (tp)
I. Sheckley, Robert, 1928- . II. Title.
PS3569.H392B7 1991
813'.54-dc20 91-18153
CIP

Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

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Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the
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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 middle 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 overkill; 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 direction, 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 degrees? 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 millions 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 Babylonian times, when people really knew how to sin. It still bore rusty bas-reliefs of winged 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 unremitting. 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.