Exiled from Earth

Начало книги

The night old Howard Brian got his impossible yen to return to Earth, we were playing to an almost-full house at Smit’s Terran Theater on Salvor. A crowd like that one really warms a director’s heart. Five hundred solemn-mouthed, rubber-faced green Salvori had filed into the little drab auditorium back of the circus aviary, that night. They had plunked down two credits apiece to watch my small troupe of exiled Terran actors perform.

We were doing King Lear that night—or rather, a boiled-down half-hour condensation of it. I say with I hope pardonable pride that it wasn’t too bad a job. The circus management limits my company to half an hour per show, so we won’t steal time from the other attractions.

A nuisance, but what could we do? With Earth under inflexible Neopuritan sway, we had to go elsewhere and take whatever bookings we could. I cut Lear down to size by pasting together a string of the best speeches, and to Sheol with the plot. Plot didn’t matter here, anyway; the Salvori didn’t understand a word of the show.

Читать дальше →