"Anderson, Poul - Man-Kzin Wars - Inconstant Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

knife. Now the wind was gusting out of him. His gullet was afire.
Sluggishness crept into his motions. "Ya-a-ah, police, helpl Ki-yai!"
A whistle skirled. The kzin halted. He stared past Saxtorph. The man dared
not turn his head, but he heard cries and footfalls. The kzin turned and
sped in the opposite direction, upspin. He whirled into the first crosslane
he came to and disappeared.
And that wasn't like his breed, either. Saxtorph sagged back against a
wallfront and sobbed breath into his lungs. Sweat was cold and acrid on
him. He felt the beginnings of the shakes and started calling calm down on
himself, as the Zen master who helped train him for war had taught.
One cop waved off a score or so of people whom the commotion had drawn
after him and his companion. The other approached Saxtorph. He was stocky,
clean-shaven, unremarkable except fbr the way he
 6 Poul Anderson

cocked his ears forward-neither aristocrat nor Belter, just a commoner from
Wunderland. "Was ist hier los?" he demanded somewhat wildly.
Saxtorph could have recalled the Danish of his childhood, before the family
moved to America, and brushed the rust off what German he'd once studied,
and made a stab at this language. The hell with it. "Y-y-you speak
English?" he panted.
"Ja, some," the policeman answered. "Vat is t'is? Don't you know not to
push a kzin around?"
"I sure do know, and did nothing of the sort." Steadiness was returning.
"He bushwhacked me, completely unprovoked. And, yes, this sort of thing
isn't supposed to happen with kzinti, and I can't make any more sense of it
than you. Aren't you going to chase him?"
"He's gone," said the policeman glumly. "He vill be back in Tigertown and
t'e trail lost before ve can bring a sniffer to follow him. How you going
tell vun of t'ose Teufeter from anot'er? You come along to t'e station,
sir. Ve vill give you first aid and take your statement. "
Saxtorph drew a long breath, grinned lopsidedly, and replied, "Okay. I'll
want to make a couple of phone calls. My wife, and-it'd be smart to ask
Commissioner Markham if I can put off my appointment with him."
 2

Tiamat is much less known outside its system than it deserves to be. Once
hyperdrive transport has become readily available and cheap, it may well
be receiving tourists from all of human space: fbr it is a curious
object, with considerable historical significance as well.
Circling Alpha Centauri A near the middle of those asteroids called the
Serpent Swarm, it was originally a chondritic body with a sideritic
component giving it more structural strength than is usual for that kind.
A rough cylinder, about 50 kilometers in length and 20 in diameter, it
rotated on its long axis in a bit over ten hours; and at the epoch when
humans arrived, that axis happened to be almost normal to the orbital
plane. Those who settled on Wunderland paid it no attention; they had a
habitable planet. The Belters who came later, from the asteroids of the
Solar System, realized what a treasure was theirs. Little work was needed
to make the cylinder smooth, control precession, and give it a