"Alexei Panshin - New Celebrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Panshin Alexei)

situation and her roommate. The reason for the removal was that Mrs. Bogue, the escort, found the
conversation in the main cabin not to her taste, and if she wasn’t interested, she was sure that the girls
would not be.

The topic of conversation was theology, and the girls, for their own private and inscrutable reasons,
chiefest of which was Mrs. Bogue’s non-interest—therefore, absence—professed themselves only too
eager to stay and learn of these strange and interesting matters.

This was no use, however. Mrs. Bogue knew what she was being paid for—to deliver five girls to a
school on Nashua. This she meant to do as efficiently and at as little trouble to herself as was possible.
Consequently, she accused the girls of Massive Indiscipline, proof of which was their slowness to jump
when she said “Frog,” and decided the most effective method of instilling discipline was general
confinement to quarters. The old ploys are the best ones.

The girls probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the theology anyway. None of the other passengers did. Men
stayed in their bunks reading factsheets for the third time about the shortage of body parts currently
causing tremors in hospital stock issues on Morian. I mean . . . dull. But still preferable.

The captain even said to his first officer, “It’s lucky old Bolaire isn’t going to have a look at the cabin this
trip. ‘Under-utilized,’ and next trip there would be half the space.”

“Don’t anticipate, sir. He may be waiting at Star Well.”

“There’s no need to worry, son. He never inspects a ship that his relative there is crewing on. It may be
trust, but I think he hasn’t got the stomach for it.”

“Iheard that,” said the third officer.

And he did, but he forgot it before morning, and things you don’t remember never happened. The third
officer heard lots of things, all of which he noted down carefully and promptly forgot. Everybody and
everything was always new to him. He was introduced to the captain for the first time every morning.
When he finally retired, he was carted off his last ship and placed by his family fireside where his old, old
mother read Mrs. Waldo Wintergood’s animal stories to him every night.

The two theologians were an interesting pair.

One was a Trog named Torve, a light brown, woolly, six foot tall toad. He had a white belly and the
faintest of black stripes on his back. His personality was lumpish. His motives were inscrutable.

And mark this: the Trogs, since their defeat by men some two hundred years before, had been confined
by law to two solar systems. To travel anywhere outside these two solar systems, special papers were
necessary. They were requested at every planet, at every way station, registered and returned.
Fifty-three Trogs had such papers. Torve was not one of them. Keep your eye on him and watch what
happens.

The other was a fraudulent old fart named Augustus Srb. Short, fat, intelligent, even magnificent, he wore
his mantle as a priest of the Revived Church of Mithra with a verve, a flair, that was not matched by his
defense of churchly doctrine.

Mithra was worshiped six centuries before the founding of Rome, and has had his ups and downs ever