"C M Kornbluth - A Mile Beyond the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

Through the fading pinwheels I saw a long and horrid face, a Sirian face, peering at me
with kindly interest under the table. It was Wenjtkpli.
"Good morning, little Earth chum," he said. "You feel not so tired now?"
"Morning?" I yelled, sitting up again and cracking my head again and lying down again to
wait for the pinwheels to fade again.
"You sleep," I heard him say, "fourteen hours—so happy, so peaceful!"
"I gotta get out of here," I mumbled, scrambling about on the imported sawdust for my
hat. I found I was wearing it, and climbed out, stood up, and leaned against the table,
swaying and spitting out the last of the spruce and cedar.
"You like another stinger?" asked Wenjtkpli brightly. I retched feebly.
"Fourteen hours," I mumbled. "That makes it 0900 Mars now, or exactly ten hours past
the time I was supposed to report for the nightside at the bureau."
"But last night you talk different," the Sirian told me in surprise. "You say many times how
bureau chief McGillicuddy can take lousy job and jam—"
"That was last night," I moaned. "This is this morning."
"Relax, little Earth chum. I sing again song you taught me:
X is for the ecstasy she ga-a-ave me; E is for—"
My throbbing head still objected. I flapped good-by at him and set a course for the door
of Blogri's joint. The quaint period mottoes: "QUAFFE YE NUT-BROWN AYLE" "DROPPE
DEAD TWYCE" and so on—didn't look so quaint by the cold light of the Martian dawn.
An unpleasant little character, Venusian or something, I'd seen around the place oozed
up to me. "Head hurt plenty,
“Huh?" he simpered.
"This is no time for sympathy," I said. "Now one side or a flipper off—I gotta go to work."
"No sympathy," he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. He fumbled oddly in his belt,
then showed me a little white capsule. "Clear your head, huh? Work like lightning, you bet!"
I was interested. "How much?"
"For you, friend, nothing. Because I hate seeing fellows suffer with big head."
"Beat it," I told him, and shoved past through the door.
That pitch of his with a free sample meant he was pushing
J-K-B. I was in enough trouble without adding an unbreakable addiction to the stuff. If I'd
taken his free sample, I would have been back to see him in 12 hours, sweating blood for
more. And that time he would have named his own price.
I fell into an eastbound chair and fumbled a quarter into the slot The thin, cold air of the
pressure dome was clearing my head already. I was sorry for all the times I’d cussed a
skinflint dome administration for not supplying a richer air mix or heating the outdoors more
lavishly. I felt
food enough to shave, and luckily had my razor in my wallet. By the time the chair was
gliding past the building, where Interstellar News had a floor, I had the whiskers off my jaw
and most of the sawdust out of my hair.
The floater took me up to our floor while I tried not to think of what McGillicuddy would
have to say.
The newsroom was full of noise as usual. McGillicuddy vu in the copydesk slot chewing
his way through a pile of dpatches due to be filed on the pressure dome split for A.M.
newscasts in four minutes by the big wall clock. He fed his copy, without looking, to an
operator battering the keys of fte old-fashioned radioteletype that was good enough to serve
for local clients.
"Two minutes short!" he yelled at one of the men on the "Gimme a brightener! Gimme a
god-damned brightener!" The rim man raced to the receiving ethertypes from rCammadion,
Betelgeuse, and the other Interstellar bureaus. He yanked an item from one of the clicking