The Best of L. Sprague de Camp
- Автор: Де Камп Лайон Спрэг
- Год: 1978
- Язык: английский
- Год: Del Rey / Ballantine
- ISBN: 0-345-25474-0
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «The Best of L. Sprague de Camp». Краткое содержание книги:
Staples wriggled, but the keepers had handled tougher game than a mere human being. "Listen, Dr. Traphagen," he said, "you can decide I'm a nut if you like. But I wish you'd take a look at the mammoth first. Did you ever hear of Dr. Gilmore Platt?"
"Tsk, tsk, my dear sir, first you say your name is Staples, then you produce a card with 'Nively' on it, and now you say you're Dr. Platt. Now just keep quiet. You're going to a nice place where you can play with all the mammoths you want"
Staples protested some more, but it got him nowhere. He was not a very articulate man, especially with his hat off, and he could make no headway against Traphagen's repeated injunctions to keep calm.
The ambulance arrived, and the men in white coats marched Staples out of the Administration Building and down the walk. Traphagen waddled behind. The truck was standing just in front of the ambulance. Staples yelled: "Tecumtha!" The mammoth hoisted his trunk and trumpeted. The horrible brassy sound so startled the internes that they let go of Staples, but to their credit they grabbed their patient again before he could take action.
Traphagen ran over and looked under the canvas. He came back crying: "Oh, dear me! Oh, dear me! I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry! Come to think of it, I do know about Platt and his process. But I never thought you were really him—I mean from him. It's all a mistake, boys, it's all a mistake. He isn't crazy, after all."
The internes released Staples. In a tone of injured dignity, he said: "I've been trying for fifteen minutes to explain who I am, Dr. Traphagen, but you wouldn't let me."
Traphagen apologized some more, and said: "Now, I don't know if you still want to discuss the sale of that animal, my dear sir, but I'd be glad to. I'll have to look at our budget first, to see what our unexpended balance for the quarter is—"
I was really more amused than angry, though I didn't let Traphagen see that until we'd agreed on the price. He was so embarrassed that he gave me a good one. A few dollars of it had to go to the Benefit Fund of the Carriesville police department, to square me with them.
Platt has hired some guards and had the place fenced properly. I don't think the Marco Polo outfit will try anything again. After all that publicity any 'accidents would look suspicious. Platt also hired another assistant, an enthusiastic young paleontologist named Roubideaux. They're in Wyoming now digging dinosaurs out of the Laramie Cretaceous beds.
We have some fine specimens in the cages, and more coming along in the tanks. One of the latter is a Mastodon americanus, already promised to the Bronx Zoological Park in New York.
But I started out to tell you why I wanted to leave Platt. In the first place, I'm a geologist, not a wild-animal keeper. The above gives you some idea of what working for Platt is like. In the second, I have, as I said, a family to support, and I want to keep my health. Last week I got a wire from Platt saying they'd found a complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, fifty feet long and with a mouth full of six-inch teeth. I know what that means, and I think I'd better clear out while I'm still in one piece.
Best personal regards to you and Georgia. See you soon, I hope. Ken.
THE GNARLY MAN
DR. MATILDA SADDLER first saw the gnarly man on the evening of June 14th, 1956, at Coney Island. The spring meeting of the Eastern Section of the American Anthropological Association had broken up, and Dr. Saddler had had dinner with two of her professional colleagues, Blue of Columbia and Jeffcott of Yale. She mentioned that she had never visited Coney and meant to go there that evening. She urged Blue and Jeffcott to come along, but they begged off.
Watching Dr. Saddler's retreating back, Blue of Columbia crackled: "The Wild Woman from Wichita. Wonder if she's hunting another husband?" He was a thin man with a small gray beard and a who-the-Hell-are-you-Sir expression.
"How many has she had?" asked Jeffcott of Yale.
"Three to date. Don't know why anthropologists lead the most disorderly private lives of any scientists. Must be that they study the customs and morals of all these different peoples, and ask themselves, 'If the Eskimos can do it why can't we?' I'm old enough to be safe, thank God."
"I'm not afraid of her," said Jeffcott. He was in his early forties and looked like a farmer uneasy in store-bought clothes. "I'm so very thoroughly married."
"Yeah? Ought to have been at Stanford a few years ago, when she was there. It wasn't safe to walk across the campus, with Tuthill chasing all the females and Saddler all the males."
Dr. Saddler had to fight her way off the subway train, as the adolescents who infest the platform of the B.M.T.'s Stillwell Avenue Station are probably the worst-mannered people on earth, possibly excepting the Dobu Islanders of the Western Pacific. She didn't much mind. She was a tall, strongly built woman in her late thirties, who had been kept in trim by the outdoor rigors of her profession. Besides, some of the inane remarks in Swift's paper on occulturation among the Arapaho Indians had gotten her fighting blood up.
Walking down Surf Avenue toward Brighton Beach, she looked at the concessions without trying them, preferring to watch the human types that did and the other human types that took their money. She did try a shooting gallery, but found knocking tin owls off their perch with a .22 too easy to be much fun. Long-range work with an army rifle was her idea of shooting.
The concession next to the shooting gallery would have been called a sideshow if there had been a main show for it to be a sideshow to. The usual lurid banner proclaimed the uniqueness of the two-headed calf, the bearded woman, Arachne the spider-girl, and other marvels. The piece de resistance was Ungo-Bungo the ferocious ape-man, captured in the Congo at a cost of twenty-seven lives. The picture showed an enormous Ungo-Bungo squeezing a hapless Negro in each hand, while others sought to throw a net over him.
Although Dr. Saddler knew perfectly well that the ferocious apeman would turn out to be an ordinary Caucasian with false hair on his chest, a streak of whimsicality impelled her to go in. Perhaps, she thought, she could have some fun with her colleagues about it.
The spieler went through his leather-lunged harangue. Dr. Saddler guessed from his expression that his feet hurt. The tattooed lady didn't interest her, as her decorations obviously had no cultural significance, as they have among the Polynesians. As for the ancient Mayan, Dr. Saddler thought it in questionable taste to exhibit a poor microcephalic idiot that way. Professor Yogi's legerdemain and fire-eating weren't bad.
A curtain hung in front of Ungo-Bungo's cage. At the appropriate moment there were growls and the sound of a length of chain being slapped against a metal plate. The spieler wound up on a high note:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Ungo-Bungo!" The curtain dropped.
The ape-man was squatting at the back of his cage. He dropped his chain, got up, and shuffled forward. He grasped two of the bars and shook them. They were appropriately loose and rattled alarmingly. Ungo-Bungo snarled at the patrons, showing his even yellow teeth.
Dr. Saddler stared hard. This was something new in the ape-man line. Ungo-Bungo was about five feet three, but very massive, with enormous hunched shoulders. Above and below his blue swimming trunks, thick grizzled hair covered him from crown to ankle. His short stout-muscled arms ended in big hands with thick gnarled fingers. His neck projected slightly forward, so that from the front he seemed to have but little neck at all.