"David Grinnell & Lin Carter - Destination Saturn" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grinnell David)

"You fumble-headed, slack-jawed idiot!" she hissed between tightly clenched teeth. "Of
course EMSA'll have to break up your precious planetoid in order to take apart the Asteroidal
drive-engines and weaponry—and why shouldn't they, you dense-witted cretin?"

"Why shouldn't they, you ask? I'll tell you why!"

"Tell me then, Ajax, you idiot."

"King Ajax!" he snapped.

"King Ajax, you idiot," she complied.

Ajax drew himself up and fixed the angry girl with an Imperial eye. "I say, Miss
Hackenschmidt, you do leave something to be desired, as an Ambassador Plenipotentiary, in
the tact-and-diplomacy department."

"Oh, flack tact and diplomacy! Ajax, you make me so mad ! And stop calling me 'Miss
Hackenschmidt' as if I were your high-school cybernetics teacher or something!"

Ajax looked pained. "Please watch your language before royalty. Shall I call you 'Miss
Hackenwhacken'?—No, but," he overrode her reply and continued serenely: "really, though,
my objection to this item in the treaty should be blatantly obvious. I yielded exploitation rights
to EMSA in return for EMSA's recognition of my sovereign state. But if EMSA dismembers
and carts off the planetoid-ship, there goes my sovereign state."

"Your so-called 'sovereign state' "—she pronounced the words with scathing emphasis—"is
going to have to go, anyway, Ajax, dismembered or not. EMSA can't leave that flying treasure
trove of scientific secrets within grabbing range of the Saturnian border. Which reminds me. I
should never have let you persuade me to join you here on Earth… it's pretty dumb for both of
us to be here, leaving the planetoid-ship unattended. What if the Saturnians make a grab while
we're sitting here yelling at each other? Where's your 'sovereign state' then?"

Ajax smiled his infuriatingly superior smile, plucked a stimulette from the rosewood box
on the nearest end table and drew on it until the self-igniting tip caught. He did this with the
practiced smoothness of a stereovision actor performing a bit of "business" designed to
communicate something to the effect that "cooler heads than thine, my saucy miss, are at work
and have already anticipated the eventuality."

"You forget the Wuj," he said calmly.
 As ever, the thought of the diminutive Martian spider-being made him smile with quiet
pride. Out of all the recent mishmash of phony planetoids and amoebic pseudo-subjects and
interplanetary war, the one good thing that had happened to him in his quixotic quest for a
private planetary empire was—the Wuj. Alexander had his Hephaestion, Dr. Johnson his
Boswell… and Ajax the First, the Third Least Wuj of the Northern Panel Spinnery and the
Eggery of the Silvery Downs!

Emily looked dubious.

"I don't know… the Wuf is certainly loyal , but… well, he's not human and doesn't think
like a human, and who can predict what hell do in an unexpected situation? Besides, those