Hazards by Mike Resnick Read Free Book Online Page A

today?”
    “I wasn’t myself this morning,” said Victor.
    “Mighty few folks around here are,” I agreed.
    “You misunderstand,” he said. “Something I ate last night disagreed with me.”
    I resisted the urge to ask whether that was before or after he ate it, and just started swimming. A minute later there was a splash, followed by a loud crunching noise.
    “Piranha,” explained Victor.
    “Gesundheit,” I said.
    “I hope it wasn’t anyone I know,” he added.
    I made it to the far shore, climbed up onto dry land, thanked Victor for his help, took one last look at the island, and headed off to find some congenial spot where the sinners and scarlet women all congregated and I could finally settle down to the serious business of building my Tabernacle.

Chartreuse Mansions
    I wandered through the wilderness for a few days after leaving Dr. Mirbeau and his Island of Annoyed Souls. I figgered any minute now a great big city would break into view, but you’d be surprised how few of them there are down in South America, and especially in the middle of the jungle.
    They’d told me that the Amazon Basin was filled with Indians, but I never saw no basin, just a bunch of swamps and rivers. Finally, when I’d been on my own for five days, I ran head-first into a couple of little bitty fellers, maybe an inch or two over five feet, and dressed for exactly the kind of warm humid weather what we was having a lot of, which is to say they wore loincloths and matching headbands, and if they had on a third thing I never saw it.
    Well, these wasn’t like no Indians I’d ever seen back in the States, before the government guv me my walking papers, but I figgered what the hell, how different can one Indian be from another, so I held up my hand and said “How!”
    The one on the right jumped back, and the one on the left looked like he might faint dead away, so I figured I better keep talking while I still had an audience.
    “I have traveled many moons,” I said. “Seek city of the palefaces. Especially interested in wampum.”
    They just looked at me like I was some kind of foreigner who was too stupid to speak Indian, and even when I tapped myself on the chest and explained that I was their Kemosabee they just kind of stood there like a couple of potted plants, and I decided that I’d been the victim of false doctrine and whatever these two was, it wasn’t Indians.
    After a while they stopped looking scared and started looking bored, and finally they just kind of wandered off into the jungle. I suppose I could have followed ’em, but I couldn’t see no sense winding up in some little village where I was the only one who spoke Indian, so instead I just started walking again, trusting to the good Lord to direct me to some city that was suitable for building my tabernacle.
    I walked another day and night, and it occurred to me that being lost was mighty hungry work and I hadn’t et a real meal in close to a week now, living on fruits and berries and the like. I’d found a clutch of eggs one morning and figured to make an omelet, but even before I could remember that I didn’t have nothing to cook ’em in, they each hatched out a little alligator. Most of ’em took one look at me and high-tailed it the other direction, but there was one who must’ve thunk I was his mother, because he kept rubbing against me, and when I started walking he fell into step behind me, and I was thinking that if he stuck around for another three or four years and I didn’t come on no city by then maybe I could train him to hunt dinner for us each day, but then he saw a boa constrictor and decided that was his mama, and he gave me a look that said I wasn’t the only one who’d been betrayed by false doctrine, and then he headed off with the snake and that was the last I saw of him.
    I was just trying to figger out whether to keep going in the same direction, or maybe follow one of these hundreds of streams and rivers I kept passing and