"C M Kornbluth - Shark Ship" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kornbluth C M)

hand-clasp. "Captain Salter," the Commodore said, "my youngest and rashest, and my best harvester.
Salter, this is Captain Degerand of the White Fleet."



Salter frankly gawked. He knew perfectly well that Grenville's Convoy was far from sailing alone upon
the seas. On watch he had beheld distant sails from time to time. He was aware that cruising the
two-degree belt north of theirs was another convoy and that in the belt south of theirs was still another, in
fact that the seaborne population of the world was a constant one billion, eighty million.



But never had he expected to meet face to face any of them except the one and a quarter million who
sailed under Grenville's flag.



Degerand was younger than he, all deeply tanned skin and flashing pointed teeth. His uniform was
perfectly ordinary and very queer. He understood Salter's puzzled look. "It's woven cloth," he said. "The
White Fleet was launched several decades after Grenville's. By then they had machinery to reconstitute
fibers suitable for spinning and they equipped us with it. It's six of one and half a dozen of the other. I
think our sails may last longer than yours, but the looms require a lot of skilled labor when they break
down."



The Commodore had left them.



"Are we very different from you?" Salter asked.



Degerand said: "Our differences are nothing. Against the dirt men we are brothers—blood brothers."



The term "dirt men" was discomforting; the juxtaposition with "blood" more so. Apparently he was
referring to whoever it was that lived on the continents and islands—a shocking breach of manners, of
honor, of faith. The words of the* Charter circled through Salter's head. ". . . return for the sea and its
bounty . . . renounce and abjure the land from which we . . ." Salter had been ten years old before he
knew that there were continents and islands. His dismay must have shown on his face.



"They have doomed us," the foreign captain said. "We cannot refit. They have sent us out, each upon our
two degrees of ocean in larger or smaller convoys as the richness of the brit dictated, and they have cut
us off. To each of us will come the catastrophic storm, the bad harvest, the lost net, and death."