"Mike Resnick - Tales Of The Galactic Midway - Alien-Tamer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

“You're very amusing, sir,” said the guide. “Are all members of your race like you?”
“None of ‘em are half as good-looking as me,” said Monk. “And most of ‘em would
have you boiled in oil for bringing them out here just to look at seals. They ain't all as
good-natured as I am.”
“Oh,” replied the guide.
It was the very last thing he said, and shortly thereafter Monk was back aboard his
ship, bound for Sabellius III and wondering why it was so difficult to put together an
animal act in a universe filled with exotic life forms.
He had landed on Bori IV two months ago, hopeful of finding everything he needed
there and cutting short his trip. What he found was impressive, to be sure, and there
was no question that they were dangerous and carnivorous.
They were also some twenty-five feet at the shoulder, fifty tons in weight, and so
incredibly simpleminded as to be totally untrainable. Not that their intelligence
mattered all that much; they were also too big to fit into his ship and too expensive to
feed, which negated all further considerations.
The second world he had visited, Gamma Delta V, had provided the most interesting
animals: amoeba-like blobs of protoplasm that could be trained to form themselves
into artistic and fascinating shapes. He spent a few days working with them before
concluding—reluctantly, because they were very pleasant and quite amenable to
training—that while they might have enhanced an art gallery, they just weren't a
viable act for a carnival.
He found pretty much what he wanted on Dorillion, the third world he visited. They
had four different catlike species of carnivore, ranging from a silver animal barely
smaller than a leopard to a huge mottled creature almost twice the size of a lion. They
were reasonably intelligent and reasonably trainable—and unreasonably expensive.
He radioed Flint and laid out the situation for him—two million credits per animal—
and wasn't surprised that Flint felt the prices were outrageous.
He never found out what kind of animals there were on Quantos VIII.
Long before he got there he was informed that because of a worldwide plague that
had affected their meat animals,all their other animals were now being used as food.
The fifth world on his agenda was Voorhite XIV. He didn't land there either, once he
found out that it possessed a chlorine atmosphere and that its animals would perish
upon contact with oxygen.
Beta Scuti XI was the sixth of the ten worlds Mr. Ahasuerus had programmed into the
ship's navigational computer, and as he took off from it on the long journey to
Sabellius III he found himself seriously wondering if he wouldever find replacements
for Bruno and Simba and the leopards.
Monk had never liked being confined in close quarters, and his added worries about
the act served only to make him more uncomfortable than usual during this leg of the
voyage.
After spending a few hours trying to concentrate on some books he had borrowed
from Tojo—he had taken twenty-seven volumes and hadn't made it to page 30 of any
of them—he let himself into the cargo hold for what had become his daily calisthenic
session. It had taken him perhaps ten seconds during his first day in space to realize
that he didn'tknow any calisthenics, and he had created a regimen based on his
remembrances of the warming-up exercises he had seen during pro football pre-game
shows on Sunday afternoons. Then one day he had turned off the gravity controls and
practiced “swimming” through the air; it hadn't worked quite the way he had
anticipated, but he had kept in some semblance of physical shape by pushing off from
one wall to the next, not unlike a giant bullfrog. At first, his sessions lasted only