"Zach Hughes - The Stork Factor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

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The Stork Factor by Zach
Hughes

CHAPTER ONE

Just four years previously Richard Skeerzy had taken the Funland, Ltd.,
tour around the moon. The tour ship didn't land on the moon, of course.
No one went to the moon any more, just around it. The moon was a dead
globe of space debris from which the last iota of scientific value had been
extracted during the decades before and after the turn of the twenty-first
century. Viewed from the tinted ports of a ship such as the Nebulous, the
moon was a cold, empty wasteland. However, Skeerzy considered his trip
into space to be the apogee of an otherwise ordinary life.

Not that Richard Skeerzy wasn't satisfied with his lot. As he had told
LaVerne many times, the glory of being one of His creatures in His
magnificent universe was reward enough. If, to the pleasure of mere
existence, he added the smug knowledge that he, as a relatively young
member of the ruling Christian Party, was a Brother on the way up, then
that made life only slightly more satisfying.

The tourist ship Nebulous started final deceleration thirty minutes out
of the Funland Gate, North America. There was no warning. LaVerne, not
prepared for the gentle force of it, emitted a surprised squeak as she
drifted slowly from her couch. Richard, laughing with the air of an
experienced space traveler, engaged his wife and retrieved her as if she
were a helium balloon. He placed her on the couch and helped her strap
in, smiling on her with a great and doting pride. She was a particularly
lovable child and she had learned a lesson.
 Richard had been engaged in a lecture on the wonders of His creation
and how one should endeavor to see at least a small portion of that
creation. It was Richard's way of rationalizing away the extravagance of a
honeymoon which impoverished his new marriage. Space travel, that is,
the quick trip up to the North American Gate, the transfer to the
Nebulous, the single orbit of the moon, was a frightfully expensive way to
spend a week. Space travel was so expensive and so relatively unrewarding
in material worth that it had almost bankrupted the First Republic before
the long-suffering silent majority rose up and, under the leadership of the
Brothers, returned the country to the area of sanity. The Nebulous had
been built with private funds and the North American Station, the one
great achievement of the governmental space effort, was leased to
Funland, Ltd., which lost money on the operation, but maintained it for