"Robert A. Heinlein - Double Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

is you have to be a spaceman when you do it, with a spaceman's alert body and
unconscious balance-you have to live it. A city man blunders along on smooth floors
all his life, steady floors with Earth-normal gravity, and will trip over a
cigarette paper, like as not. Not so a spaceman.
"See what I mean?" I asked, slipping back into my seat.
"I'm afraid I do," he admitted suurly. "Did I walk like that?"
"Yes."
"Hmmm... Maybe I should take lessons from you."
"You could do worse," I admitted.
He sat there looking me over, then started to speak-changed his mind and
wiggled a finger at the bartender to refill our glasses. When the drinks came, he
paid for them, drank his, and slid out of his seat all in one smooth motion. "Wait
for me," he said quietly.
With a drink he had bought sitting in front of me I could not refuse. Nor
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did I want to; he interested me. I liked him, even on ten minutes' acquaintance; he
was the sort of big ugly-handsome galoot that women go for and men take orders from.
He threaded his way gracefully through the room and passed a table of four
Martians near the door. I didn't like Martians. I did not fancy having a thing that
looks like a tree trunk topped off by a sun helmet claiming the privileges of a man.
I did not like the way they grew pseudo limbs; it reminded me of snakes crawling out
of their holes. I did not like the fact that they could look all directions at once
without turning their heads-if they had had heads, which of course they don't. And I
could not stand their smell!
Nobody could accuse me of race prejudice. I didn't care what a man's color,
race, or religion was. But men were men, whereas Martians were things. They weren't
even animals to my way of thinking. I'd rather have had a wart hog around me any
day. Permitting them in restaurants and bars used by men struck me as outrageous.
But there was the Treaty, of course, so what could I do?
These four had not been there when I came in, or I would have whiffed them.
For that matter, they certainly could not have been there a few moments earlier when
I had walked to the door and back. Now there they were, standing on their pedestals
around a table, pretending to be people. I had not even heard the air conditioning
speed up.
The free drink in front of me did not attract me; I simply wanted my host to
come back so that I could leave politely. It suddenly occurred to me that he had
glanced over that way just before he had left so hastily and I wondered if the
Martians had anything to do with it. I looked over at them, trying to see if they
were paying attention to our table-but how could you tell what a Martian was looking
at or what it was thinking? That was another thing I didn't like about them.
I sat there for several minutes fiddling with my drink and wondering what
had happened to my spaceman friend. I had hoped that his hospitality might extend to
dinner and, if we became sufficiently simpatico, possibly even to a small temporary
loan. My other prospects were-I admit it!-slender. The last two times I had tried to
call my agent his autosecretary had simply recorded the message, and unless I
deposited coins in the door, my room would not open to me that night . . . That was
how low my fortunes had ebbed: reduced to sleeping in a coin-operated cubicle.
In the midst of my melancholy ponderings a waiter touched me on the elbow.
"Call for you, sir."