"James Tiptree Jr. - The Only Neat Thing to Do" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

subject with a pessimistic grunt, and they turn back
into his office, where the patrol captain is waiting.
FedBase 900's best depot supply team is long
overdue, and it is time to declare them officially
missing, and initiate and organize a search.
Coati Cass continues on through the surface
sections of the base to the fueling port. She had to
stop here to get clearance and the holocharts of the
frontier area, and she can top off her tanks. If it
weren't for those charts, she might have risked
going straight on out, for fear they'd stop her. But
now that she's cleared, she's enjoying her first
glimpse of a glamorous Far FedBase-—so long as it
doesn't delay her start for her goal, her true goal, so
long dreamed of: free, unexplored space and
unknown, unnamed stars.
Far Bases are glamorous; the Federation had
learned the hard way that they must be pleasant,
sanity-promoting duty. So, the farther out a base is,
and the longer the tours, the more lavishly it is set
up and maintained. Base 900 is built mostly inside
a big, long-orbit, airless rock, yet it has gardens and
pools that would be the envy of a world's richest
citizen. Coati sees displays for the tiny theater
advertising first-run shows and music, all free to
station personnel; and she passes half a dozen
different exotic little places to eat. Inside the rock
the maps show sports and dance shells, spacious
private quarters, and winding corridors, all nicely
planted and decorated, because it has been found
that stress is greatly reduced if there are plenty of
alternate, private routes for people to travel to their
daily duties.
Building a Far Base is a full-scale Federation job.
But it conserves the Federation's one irreplaceable
resource—her people. Here at FedBase 900 the
people are largely Human, since the other four
spacefaring races are concentrated to the
Federation's south and east. This far north, Coati
has glimpsed only one alien couple, both Swain;
their greenish armor is familiar to her from the
spaceport back home. She won't find really exotic
aliens here.
But what, and who, lives out there on the fringes
of the Rift?—not to speak of its unknown farther
shores? Coati pauses to take a last look before she
turns in to Fuels and Supply. From this port she can
really see the Rift, like a strange irregular black
cloud lying along the northern zenith.
The Rift isn't completely lightless, of course. It is