"Ursula K. LeGuin - The Dispossesed" - читать интересную книгу автора (Le Guin Ursula K)

up to the wall; they sat on it. There might be a gang to
watch, offloading crates from track trucks at the ware-
houses. There might even be a freighter on the pad.
Freighters came down only eight times a year, unan-
nounced except to syndics actually working at the Port, so
when the spectators were lucky enough to see one they
were excited, at first. But there they sat, and there it sat, a
squat black tower in a mess of movable cranes, away off
across the field. And then a woman came over from one
of the warehouse crews and said, "We're shutting down
for today, brothers." She was wearing the Defense arm-
band, a sight almost as rare as a spaceship. That was a bit


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of a thrill. But though her tone was mild, it was final.
She was the foreman of this gang, and if provoked would
be backed up by her syndics. And anyhow there wasn't
anything to see. The aliens, the off-woriders, stayed hiding
in their ship. No show.

It was a dull show for the Defense crew, too. Some-
times the foreman wished that somebody would just try to
cross the wall, an alien crewman jumping ship, or a kid
from Abbenay trying to sneak in for a closer look at the
freighter. But it never happened. Nothing ever happened.
When something did happen she wasn't ready for it

The captain of the freighter Mindful said to her, "Is that
mob after my ship?"

The foreman looked and saw that in fact there was a
real crowd around the gate, a hundred or more people.
They were standing around, just standing, the way people
had stood at produce-train stations during the Famine. It
gave the foreman a scare.

2

**No. They, ah, protest," she said in her slow and limited
lotic. "Protest the, ah, you know. Passenger?"

"You mean they're after this bastard we're supposed to
take? Are they going to try to stop him, or us?"

The word "bastard," untranslatable in the foreman's lan-
guage; meant nothing to her except some kind of foreign
term for her people, but she had never liked the sound of