"Mike Resnick - Alastair Baffle's Emporium of Wonders" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

ALASTAIR BAFFLE’S EMPORIUM OF WONDERS
by Mike Resnick

According to Locus, Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner for
short fiction, and most of those stories have appeared in Asimov’s. His
latest novel, Starship: Mercenary, appeared from Pyr in December, and
Sub-terranean Press will be publishing The Other Teddy Roosevelts in
February. In his latest tale, he takes a look at the precious gifts that can be
found, and lost, at...

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Gold and Silver—that’s us. We’ve been a team since major league
baseball ended at the Mississippi River and the flag only had forty-eight
stars. (Looked a lot nicer back then. More regular, sort of, with six rows of
eight—or maybe it was eight rows of six. I suppose it depends on whether
you were standing or lying down.) Between us we’ve outlived three wives
(one of them his, two of them mine) and two kids (both his), we’ve stayed
friends for more than three-quarters of a century (seventy-eight years to be
exact), and we’ve been living together at the Hector McPherson Retirement
Home since ... well, since we couldn’t live on our own anymore.

He’s Gold—Maury Gold. Me, I’m Nate Silver. I think it was Silverstein
until my grandfather changed it back when Teddy Roosevelt was still
president. Maury’s dad changed his right after World War I, from Goldberg
or Goldman or Gold-something-else. Makes no difference what they used
to be. We’re Gold and Silver now.

We met seventy-eight years ago, like I said. We’ve always lived in
Chicago. It was pretty safe when we were kids. The cops had cleaned up
Al Capone and his friends, and the place wasn’t crawling with junkies and
panhandlers yet, so we were each allowed to take the subway down to the
Loop by ourselves, me from Rogers Park on the North Side, Maury from
South Shore a couple of miles beyond the University of Chicago, which was
overflowing with geniuses and Communists—frequently the same
people—back in those days.

One of the things I loved to do was go to the Palmer House, the
ritziest hotel in town. The guest rooms started on the third or fourth floor,
but the ground floor and the mezzanine were filled with shops that carried
the most fascinating things: clocks that glowed in the dark, pianos that
played by themselves, clothes and jewels imported from exotic-sounding
places like Constantinople and Hong Kong and Bombay.
 And the most fascinating thing of all was a tiny store up on the
mezzanine. It was called Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders, and it was
a magic shop. It carried every trick under the sun (or so it seemed to me).
There were boxes where Alastair Baffle would put anything from a coin to
an egg, and it would vanish right before your eyes. There were empty hats
that suddenly weren’t empty any more, but filled with rabbits or flowers or
colored silks. There was a full-sized guillotine, and somehow, faster than