The World Menders

Начало книги

The captain himself escorted Farrari to the lighter and even carried one of his space bags for him.

He was a large, moody-looking man, this Captain Vaunn, and he had revolutionized Farrari’s concept of a spacer. He went grimly about his business, said very little, and seemed as phlegmatic as a robot. In two months of chance encounters he had spoken directly to Farrari only once, and that when Farrari, to relieve the unrelenting boredom of space travel, took up a textbook, “Art in Rudimentary Societies,” and spent several hours listening to the monotonous one-note scansions of primordial song. The captain knocked timidly, asked what the racket was, and, when Farrari explained, said almost apologetically, “Oh. We thought maybe you were sick, or something. Would you mind lowering—” Red-faced, Farrari turned down the volume.

But there it was. Space undoubtedly attracted a quota of hellions and adventurers, and for them its majestic emptiness would be only an inconvenient obstacle to be surpassed on the way from one place to another, the sooner the better. One would be unlikely to encounter these types on a plodding Interplanetary Relations Bureau supply ship.

Читать дальше →