"Ron Goulart - The Panchronicon Plot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Goulart Ron)

president's side, find out maybe I'll end up carrying a club in the mesozoic Era."
"No human life back then."
4 RON GOULART


"So maybe I won't need a club. The point, Jake, is I'd like you to help out."
Conger poked his tongue into the inside of his cheek and watched the calm ocean. "The
president absolutely crackers, the Secretary of Mental Health stranded in Vienna two centuries
back. . . . It's an interesting situation."
"Interesting? It's the kind of thing to make your nuts drop into your boots."
"I've pretty much promised Angelica I was retired." From his running jacket pocket he took a
phial of orange vitamin capsules. After shaking three into his palm, Conger said, "We're doing
damn well with the Vegetable Patch. I hate to abandon it even for a few—"
"Wouldn't $100,000 keep things going while you're on the assignment for me?"
Conger asked, "The Wild Talent Division is going to pay me $100,000?"
"WTD and me. Don't ask too much about where the dough's coming from. I've found a way of
hoodooing the petty cash computer."
"If the president of the United States is really crazy . . ."
"He is. I assure you. Balmy."
"Okay, then we'd better do something," said Conger. "I'll take the job."
Geer chuckled. "Splendid," he said. "First off you have to do a little recruiting. There's a guy
I've heard about whom we're going to need."
"What's his particular knack?"
"He's a time traveler."
THE PANCHRONICON PLOT 5



Chapter 2
"You remind me of my Uncle Giacomo."
"Small swarthy fellow, wasn't he?"
"All my uncles were," said Angelica, "but Uncle Giacomo was the one who was very devout."
Conger swept most of the pill bottles off the top of his bureau. The midday ocean glowed down
below the wide one-way window of their bedroom. "He's the one they buried in a kneeling
position?"
"That was Uncle Federico," replied his wife, "which was mostly because no one could figure
out how to unbend him after he got himself assassinated at that crap game. Uncle Giacomo was the
one who believed a man's talents came from God."
"Uncle Giacomo," said Conger while he packed the vitamins in his suitcase, "was a plumber."
"No, you're thinking of Uncle Antonio, the cyborg with a monkey wrench for a right hand."
"I thought it was a plunger."
"He had both. You could screw off one and screw on the other one," said his slim dark wife.
"Uncle Giacomo was the telekinetic thief."
"Oh, yeah, I remember your telling me." Conger shut the suitcase. "He's the guy who moved
five hundred cantaloupes from New Jersey to Connecticut entirely by mental effort."
"That's him. He thought you were obliged to use your God-given gifts. So he became a telek
thief."
"My gift," Conger told her, "isn't exactly God-given. It came to me by way of WTD. And I
wasn't struck suddenly with a talent for invisibility, I volunteered to be processed by the Wild
Talent Division of the US Remedial Functions Agency." He, avoiding coming too close to her,