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

fifteen minutes—after all, forty-three-year-old animal tamers didn't use the same
muscles as defensive linemen or bullfrogs—but he had gradually worked up to an
hour at a time, two periods a day. This, added to sixty minutes of bored browsing
through the books and eight hours of sleep, left him thirteen hours a day in which to
fight the overwhelming boredom of solitary spaceflight. He fondly remembered
PacMan and Asteroids from the local arcades in Vermont and tried to jury-rig his
cabin's computer for some simple games; the only result was that the hot water in his
bathroom no longer worked and the temperature in his compartment fell six degrees.
So he had long conversations with the robot pilot (which, having no voice, never
disagreed with him) and sang bawdy ballads at the top of his lungs and made up new
anecdotes to go along with the thousands he could dredge up from his colorful past at
a moment's notice. He created two all-time all-star baseball teams, one managed by
John McGraw and the other by Casey Stengel, and from his imaginary announcer's
booth called every pitch of a seven-game World Series. He created a twelve-horse
field with every fabulous thoroughbred from Man o’ War and Equipoise to Ruffian
and Seattle Slew, and had them race at every distance from six furlongs to two miles,
then did it again on muddy tracks, and finally started having his winners carry
increasingly higher weights during the rematches. He envisioned every play of a
tennis match between Bill Tilden and John McEnroe, and then, because he was still
bored and didn't like McEnroe very much anyway, had them play again after
inflicting McEnroe with hemorrhoids. He verbally rewrote the ending toCasablanca
and the beginning toCitizen Kane , he created aMaltese Falcon in which Sam Spade
didn't send the girl over and aWizard of Oz in which the Munchkins raped both
Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West.
That got him all the way up to the second world. Then hereally had to go to work.
Since leaving Beta Scuti XI he had replayed the first sixteen Super Bowls and
rewritten every Sydney Greenstreet/Peter Lorre movie he could remember, and was
just about to mentally referee a three-way shootout between Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele,
and Clint Eastwood (to even things up a bit, he had decided to make Eastwood wear a
patch over his left eye), when suddenly the robot pilot applied the ship's braking
mechanisms. Half a minute later, as he was painfully picking himself up from the
floor, a small sign lit up over the door of his cabin suggesting that he might find it
expedient to connect his safety harness and secure all loose objects in his general
vicinity.
He did as directed, picking up yet another of Tojo's books, belatedly discovered that it
contained some pretty spicy sex scenes he had overlooked, and was avidly reading it
when another sign—and a very noticeable bump—told him that the ship had touched
down. He unstrapped himself, turned on his computer, found a complex readout of the
planet's gravity and atmosphere that he didn't understand and a sign saying NO
PROTECTIVE SUIT REQUIRED that he did, walked to the hatch, opened it, and
stepped out into the warm, rather muggy Sabellian air. He breathed in deeply and
grimaced; either they had fertilized the field around the spaceport recently, or he was
going to have one hell of a difficult time adjusting to the smell of this place.
He took a shallow breath to see if it made a difference, and was not surprised to find
out that it didn't.
Off in the distance he could see a truly impressive mountain range (or else it was a lot
closer than he thought and therefore not so impressive, not that he particularly cared).
A river of blue-green water ran placidly along the outskirts of the spaceport, and he
decided that whoever had designed the landing field either didn't worry too much
about contaminating the water or didn't drink it in the first place.