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

almost as obsolete as the ship. There were 2300 pieces
of "scrimshaw" the novelties the ship's crew made
for themselves, to sell and to pass the time between
stars including poems, art objects, and knitted
goods. There were eleven thousand, almost, varieties
of flowers, fruits, ornamental trees, vegetables, and
grasses, the most promising of them already setting
new seeds in the refresher plots. There was a library
of nearly 50,000 old Earth books in the datastore
assuming anybody on this new planet read books
anymore; at Hades that part of the cargo had been a
total loss, which was one of the reasons why MacDonald
thought the planet was so well named. (But they were
good books! MacDonald had read six or seven
thousand of them herself, one time or another, and
they'd made the long travel times endurable for her.
Almost.) There were machines to sell to be copied (if
ancient Earth machines had any value anymore) and,
most of all, the huge store of data that covered every
branch of human knowledge, from medicine to an-
thropology to combinatorial mathematics (also, sadly,
subject to being deflatingly out of date).
If you put a cash value on all Nordvik's wares (as
MacDonald had to do, to figure out what to trade for
what) that had to be easily thirty or forty million dollars'
worth of goods even after you discounted the holds
packed with stuff that probably wasn't ever going to
sell to anyone, anywhere.
But the value of a commodity was what it would
fetch in the market, and who knew what these
Slowyear people would be willing to pay?
She was glad to be interrupted by the ship's bell,
less glad when it was Hans Horeger's flabbily hairy
face that appeared in the corner of the screen. "Oh,
shit," she said. At least it wasn't a personal call; it was
one of his incessant all-ship addresses.
That didn't make it much better. She resignedly
saved her worksheet and let Horeger take over the full
screen. He had got dressed after their little interlude
in the showers, anyway. Now he was wearing his
public face, calm, self-possessed and not at all like the
frantic breast-grabber whose sweaty hands had been
all over her twenty minutes before.
"Shipmates," Horeger was saying, yellow teeth
gleaming between mustache and beard, "I have just
received another communication from our next port of
call at the planet of Slowyear. We're still at long range,
but reception is better now and the news from them is
all good. They say they haven't had a ship call in a long
time. I don't know how long, exactly, because they use