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

have such wholesome smiles.
“What the hell?” I asked George.
“They think we’re cute,” he said, enjoying himself. Did I tell you George was a tiny little man? That
figures, with Tillie working for him. He loved to see us big men squinting up at the Girls from Capella, as
the world now called them.
They were from a system near Capella, they explained in delightful fragments of various Earth
languages. Their low voices really had charm. Why had they come? Well, they were a tramp freighter,
actually, taking a load of ore back to Capella. They had dropped by to clear up an old-chart notation
about our system. What was their home like? Oh, much like ours. Lots of commerce, trade. Wars? Not
for centuries. Shocking idea!
What the world wanted to know most, of course, was where were their men? Were they alone?
This evoked merry laughter. Of course they had men, to care for the ship. They showed us on a
video broadcast from Luna. There were indeed men, handsome types with muscles. The chap who did
most of the transmission looked like my idea of Leif Ericsson. There was no doubt, however, that
Captain Garbo-Dayan—or Captain Lyampka, as we learned to call her—was in charge. Well, we had
female Soviet freighter captains, too.
The one thing we couldn’t get exactly was the Capellan men’s relative heights. The scenery on these
transmissions was different. It was my private opinion, from juggling some estimates of similar
background items, that at least some of their men were earth-normal size, though burly.
The really hot questions about their space drive got gracefully laughed off. How did the ship run?
Sorry, they were not technicians. But then they sprang the bombshell. Why not come and see for
ourselves? Would we care to send a party up to Luna to look over the ship?
Would we? Would we? How many? Oh, about fifty—fifty men, please. And Tillie.
I forgot to mention about Tillie getting to be their pet. George had sent her to Sun Valley to record
some speech samples he absolutely had to have. She was introduced at the pool, looking incredibly like a
half-size Capellan. A smash. They loved it. Laughed almost to guffawing. When they found she was a
crack linguist they adopted her. George was in ecstasy with hauls of Capellan chatter no one else had,
and Tillie seemed to like it too. She was different these days—her eyes shone, and she had a kind of
tense, exalted smile. I knew why and it bothered me, but there wasn’t anything I could do.
I cut myself into her report-circuit one day.
“Tillie. It’s dangerous. You don’t know them.”
Safe at two thousand miles, she gave me the bare-faced stare.
“They’re dangerous?”
I winced and gave it up.
Tillie at fifteen had caught the full treatment from a street gang. Fought against knives, left for
dead—an old story. They’d fixed her up as good as new, except for a few interesting white hairlines in
her tan, and a six-inch layer of ice between her and everybody who shaved. It didn’t show, most of the
time. She had a nice sincere cover manner and she wore her old suits and played mousy. But it was
permanent guerrilla war, inside.
Intelligence had found her, as they often do, a ready-made weapon. She was totally loyal as long as
no one touched her. And she’d wear anything or nothing on business. I’d seen photos of Tillie on a job at
twenty that you wouldn’t believe. Fantastic—the subtle sick flavor added, too.
She let people touch her, physically I mean, on business. I imagine—I never asked. And I never
asked what happened to them afterward, or why the classified medal. It did trouble me a little when I
found out her chief case officer was dead—but that was all right, he’d had diabetes for years.
But as for letting a friend touch her—really touch her—I tried it once.
It was in George’s film vault. We were both exhausted after a fifty-hour run of work. She leaned
back and smiled, and actually touched my arm. My arm went around her automatically and I started to
bend down to her lips. At the last minute I saw her eyes.
Before I got pastured out to Smoky Bear and George, I had worked around a little, and one of the