"Michael McCollum - Maker 2 - Procyion Promise" - читать интересную книгу автора (McCollum Michael)

“We’re bored with life. The sense of adventure has gone out of us. There aren’t any frontiers left. No one
climbs Mount Everest anymore.”

Roland chuckled. “Why should they? If you want to reach the Everest Summit Hotel, you board an
airtram in Nepal. They leave every half hour.”

“Exactly! Where can you go in the solar system where you won’t find someone else’s boot prints?”

Roland shrugged, but did not answer.
“Know what I think? I think the human race is suffering from claustrophobia. We’ve learned the awful
truth that there are limits beyond which we cannot go, so we invent places like this to help us forget.”

“Isn’t that quite a lot to blame on an overpriced whorehouse?”

She looked at him sharply, suddenly aware of the undercurrent of anger in his voice. “A trained
entertainment specialist isn’t a whore, Roland.”

He raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Perhaps you can explain the difference to me sometime.”

“I didn’t mean to insult you. Put it down to overwork. Forgive me?”

“You don’t need my forgiveness. You can have me fired anytime you feel like it.”

“I guess I deserved that,” she said. She let her gaze slip from his angry face and move to the viewscreen
at the end of the small restaurant. The view was from a remote camera somewhere out on the hull. It
showed a jumble of I-beams, pressure spheres, and hull plates framed by the black of space. “Let’s
change the subject before we have an argument. I have been staring at that thing all morning. What is it?”

He turned to follow her gaze. “Just an old worker dormitory usedduring The Roost’s construction. It’s
abandoned now, of course.”

“I would think the owners would keep local space clear of all such hazards to navigation. Wouldn’t be
very good publicity for a shipload of tourists to run into that heap on approach.”

He shook his head. “It isn’t as ramshackle as it appears. Look closely. See the thruster cluster jutting out
near the airlock? There are twenty more scattered over the hull. That hulk and a half dozen others are
slaved to theRoost’s central computer.”

“Sounds like a lot of trouble to go to for a junkyard,” Chryse said.

“It’s part of the service. The hulks make good destinations for clients with a yen to explore the mysteries
of space.”

“The what?”

He laughed, his pique suddenly forgotten. “Haven’t you ever skin dived on a sunken ship?”

She shook her head.

“How about going up to Zeta Deck then? They have a near perfect simulation of theEsmeralda there.