"Piper, H Beam - Fuzzy 2 - Other Human Race2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

H Beam Piper - Fuzzy 2 - Other Human Race

The Other Human Race
Copyright @ 1964 By H. Beam Piper


1

VICTOR GREGO finished the chilled fruit juice and pushed the
glass aside, then lit a cigarette and poured hot coffee into the half-
filled cup that had been cooling. This was going to be another
Niffiheim of a day, and the night's sleep had barely rested him from
the last one and the ones before that. He sipped the coffee, and
began to feel himself rejoining the human race.

Staff conferences, all day, of course, with everybody bickering and
recriminating. He hoped, not too optimistically, that this would be
the end of it. By this evening all the division chiefs ought to know
what had to be done. If only they wouldn't come running back to
him for decisions they ought to make themselves, or bother him
with a lot of nit-picking details. Great God, wasn't a staff supposed
to handle staff work?

The trouble was that for the last fifteen years, twelve at least, all the
decisions had been made in advance, and the staff work had all
been routine, but that had been when Zarathustra had been a
Class­HI planet and the company had owned it outright. In the
Chartered Zarathustra Company, emergencies had simply not
been permitted to arise. Not, that was, until old Jack Holloway had
met a small person whom he had named Little Fuzzy.

Then everybody had lost their heads. He'd lost his own a few
times, and done some things he now wished he hadn't done. Most
of his subordinates hadn't recovered theirs, yet, and the
Charterless Zarathustra Company was operating, if that were the
word for it, in a state of total and permanent emergency.

The cup was half empty, again; he filled it to the top and lit a fresh
cigarette from the old one before crushing it out. Might as well get
it started. He reached to the switch and flicked on the
communication screen across the breakfast table.

In a moment, Myra Fallada appeared in it. She had elaborately
curled white hair, faintly yellowish, a round face, protuberant blue
eyes, and a lower lip of the sort associated with the ancient
Hapsburg family. She had been his secretary ever since he had
come to Zarathustra, and she thought that what had happened a
week ago in Judge Pendarvis' court had been the end of the world.