"Pohl, Frederik - Day Million" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

"Oh, hell!" she cried in pretty confusion, reaching out to
catch her balance and finding herself tumbled against a total
stranger, whom we will call Don.
They met cute. Don was on his way to have his legs
renewed. Love was the farthest thing from his mind. But
when, absentmindedly taking a shortcut across the landing
platform for submarinites and finding himself drenched, he
discovered his arms full of the loveliest girl he had ever seen,
he knew at once they were meant for each other. "Will you
marry me?" he asked. She said softly, "Wednesday," and the
promise was like a caress.
Don was tall, muscular, bronze and exciting. His name was
no more Don than Dora's was Dora, but the personal part of
it was Adonis in tribute to his vibrant maleness, and so we
will call him Don for short. His personality colour-code, in
Angstrom units, was 5,290, or only a few degrees bluer than
Dora's 5,314a measure of what they had intuitively discov-
ered at first sight; that they possessed many affinities of taste
and interest.
I despair of telling you exactly what it was that Don did for
a living1 don't mean for the sake of making money, I mean
for the sake of giving purpose and meaning to his life, to keep
him from going off his nut with boredomexcept to say that
it involved a lot of travelling. He travelled in interstellar
spaceships. In order to make a spaceship go really fast, about
thirty-one male and seven genetically female human beings
had to do certain things, and Don was one of the thirty-one.
Actually, he contemplated options. This involved a lot of
exposure to radiation fluxnot so much from his own station
in the propulsive system as in the spillover from the next
stage, where a genetic female preferred selections, and the
sub-nuclear particles making the selections she preferred de-
molished themselves in a shower of quanta. Well, you don't
give a rat's ass for that, but it meant that Don had to be clad
at all times in a skin of light, resilient, extremely strong
copper-coloured metal. I have already mentioned this, but you
probably thought I meant he was sunburned.
More that that, he was a cybernetic man. Most of his ruder
parts had been long since replaced with mechanisms of vastly
more permanence and use. A cadmium centrifuge, not a
heart, pumped his blood. His lungs moved only when he
wanted to speak out loud, for a cascade of osmotic filters
rebreathed. oxygen out of his own wastes. In a way, he
probably would have looked peculiar to a man from the 20th
century, with his glowing eyes and seven-fingered hands. But
to himself, and of course to Dora, he looked mighty manly
and grand. In the course of his voyages Don had circled
Proxima Centauri, Procyon and the puzzling worlds of Mira
Ceti; he had carried agricultural templates to the planets of
Canopus and brought back warm, witty pets from the pale