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

child, at eight, was still too unripe even for Hans
Horeger's attention.
Facing odds of that sort was a bad deal for the nine
women without regular mates. Mercy MacDonald
didn't like being one of them.
She hadn't always been. She'd had a husband for
a good many years; in fact, both she and Walter were
among the handful who were said to own a piece of
Nordvik's keel. Apart from the doddering old captain
there was no one else left aboard who, like Mercy
MacDonald, had signed on when the ship first launched
from Earth orbit. Counting the three children, eleven
of the ship's complement were ship-born; all the rest
had been picked up at one planetfall or another along
the long, twisted way.
That was just one more injustice to swallow.
Seniority should have counted for something. Even
not factoring in the datum that MacDonald was proba-
bly the smartest and most able person aboard; even not
adding on the intangible fact that she was also just
about the most loyal person in the ship's complement,
which she had proved by not jumping ship, not even
at Hades, their last port of call, when twenty-three
others were finally sufficiently fed up to pay off...
including her own husband.
Neither brains nor loyalty had paid off for her,
though. MacDonald was still no more than eighth or
ninth down in the ship's hierarchy. As "purser,"
whatever that ancient tide meant, she was head of the
trading section, to be sure, but that meant nothing
when the ship was between planets.
She thought for a moment about Hades. She had
been tempted to leave with the others there; Nordvik
was running poorer and less hopeful every year, and
there was certainly no future aboard for anyone.
But Hades had been the wrong place. Hades didn't
have much good land. Most of the planet was rocky
hills and desert, and everything good had been nailed
down by the first settlers. For whom everybody else
worked at low pay, when they could get any pay at
all. All the promising planets were well in the past,
MacDonald told herself. The longer Nordvik traveled,
the worse the places it visited seemed to get. It was
even possible that this new one they were coming up
on would be even drearier than Hades.
It wasn't the first time that notion had occurred to
her. She had even thought it during the wretched
weeks when they were orbiting Hades, with her
husband and herself snapping at each other whenever
they were in earshot. She might well have paid off