"James Tiptree Jr. -10000 Light Years From Home" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tiptree James Jr)

uniforms. Helmets on the backs of their heads and double-curve grins on their long mouths. The leader
was older and had more glitter on her crest. She swung back her droopy wing of hair, breathed twice,
wrinkled her nose and paced down the ramp to meet the U.N. President.
Then we got it. The U.N. President that year was an Ethiopian about six feet five. The top of his
head came just to the buckle on her crossbelt.
I guess the world wide hush quivered—it certainly did in George’s projection room.
“About eight-foot-three for the captain,” I said.
“Assuming the top of the head is normal,” George chirped. That’s what we love him for.
In the dimness I saw a funny look on Tillie’s face. Several girls were suppressing themselves, and
Mrs. Peabody seemed to feel an egg hatching in her uplift. The men looked like me—tense. Right then I
would have settled for green octopusses instead of those three good-looking girls.
The captain stepped back from President Enkaladugunu and said something in a warm contralto,
and somehow we all relaxed. She seemed wholesome, if you can imagine a mix of Garbo and Moshe
Dayan. The other two officers were clearly very young, and—well, I told you, they could have been
Tillie’s sisters except for size.
George got that; I saw his eyes going between Tillie and the screen.
To his disgust, all the talking was being done by our people. The three visitors stood it well,
occasionally giving brief, melodious responses. They looked mightily relaxed, and also somewhat
puzzled. The two young J.O.’s were scanning hard at the crowd and twice I saw one nudge the other.
Mercifully a Soviet-U.S.-Indian power play choked off the oratory and got the party adjourned to
Mexico’s Guest Palace—or rather, to an unscheduled pause around the pool while beds were being
lashed together and sofas substituted for chairs. Our circuit went soft. George shut himself up with his
tapes of the aliens’ few remarks, and I coped with a flock of calls about our observing devices, which got
buggered up in the furniture-moving orgy.
Two days later the party was moved to the Popo-Hilton with the swimming pool as their private
bath. Every country on earth—even the Vatican—sent visiting delegations. George was going through
fits. He was bound and determined to be the expert on Mother’s language by remote control. I had an in
with the Mexicali bureau and we did pretty well until about twenty other outfits got into the act and the
electronic feedback put us all in the hash.
“Funny thing, Max,” said George at morning staff. “They keep asking—I can only interpret as,
‘Where are the women?’ ”
“You mean, like women officials? Women in power jobs?”
“Simpler, I think. Perhaps big women, like themselves. But I get a connotation of grown-up,
women, adults. I need more of their talk among themselves, Max.”
“We’re trying, believe it. They keep flushing all the cans and laughing like maniacs. I don’t know if
it’s our plumbing or our snoops that amuse them. Did you hear about Tuesday?”
Tuesday my shivers had come back. For half an hour every recording device out to a half-mile
perimeter went dead for forty minutes, and nothing else was affected.
Another department was getting shivery too. Harry from R&D called me to see if we could get a
better look at that charm bracelet the navigator had closed the ship with.
“We can’t get so much as a gamma particle into that damn boat,” he told me. “Touch it—smooth as
glass. Try to move it, blowtorch it—nothing. It just sits there. We need that control, Max.”
“She wears it taking a bath, Harry. No emissions we can read.”
“I know what I’d do,” he grunted. “Those cream-heads up there are in a daze.”
A daze it was. The world at large loved them. They were now on grand tour, being plied with
entertainment, scenic wonders and technology. The big girls ate it up—figuratively and literally. Balloon
glasses of aquavit went down especially well from breakfast on, and they were glowingly complimentary
about everything from Sun Valley to the Great Barrier Reef with stopovers at every atomic and space
installation. Captain Garbo-Dayan really unbent on the Cote d’Azur, and the two J.O.’s had lost their
puzzled looks. In fact, they were doing a good deal of what would have looked like leering if they didn’t