"Frederick Pohl - Stopping At Slow Year" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Naked, she sat down at her desk to begin keying up the
ship's trade-goods manifest for the next planetfall.
Concentration came hard. Horeger had not given up.
She could hear him scratching at the door. She could
even hear his voice; it was too low-pitched to carry, but
that didn't matter. She knew what he was saying, and
the occasional words that filtered through "bitch"
and "tease" and even that word he used as a final
argument, "love" were all words she had heard from
him before.
It made her laugh. She knew just what he was
doing out there. She could picture him crouched at her
door, lips close to the crack, hands cupped around his
mouth so that the rest of Nordvik's people wouldn't
hear. As though any of them failed to observe his
unrelenting pursuit. Especially his wife, Maureen.
Mercy MacDonald stood up and dressed quickly in
fresh clothes, not because there was anyone to see but
because she intended to speak to Horeger and ob-
scurely did not want to do so naked. She looked at
herself in the mirror while she was pulling on the blue
coverall. Figure still good, chin clean, eyes clear not
bad for forty-five and a bit, she thought. The coverall,
on the other hand, needed mending again at the
shoulder seams; she would have to do a good deal of
patching, she thought, to get herself ready for a
planetfall. She listened at the door for a moment, then
called, "Leave me alone, Hans. It's over. If you're that
horny, go find Maureen."
But he didn't answer.
"Why, you bastard," MacDonald said to the door,
suddenly angry when she realized he had given up.
She didn't have any legitimate reason for the anger.
She had certainly made it clear to him that furtive sex
when his wife wasn't looking didn't satisfy her any-
more, especially when she discovered she was sharing
him also with her best friend.. .but why had he given
up so easily?
One of the worst features of life aboard Nordvik
was that among the fifty-six human beings who lived
on the starship, adult males were a distinct minority.
There were only twenty-two of them, against thirty-
one adult women adult enough, anyway. There
were also three children (would be four in a week or
two, MacDonald reminded herself, as soon as Betsy
arap Dee delivered herself), but the ones already born
were all girls, which would some day make the balance
even worse. Would, that is, if no one else jumped ship,
or if they didn't recruit any new people at their next
stop; but that was for the future. Meanwhile the oldest