"Donald Westlake - SH5 - Hitch Your Spaceship To A Star" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westlake Donald E)

“About three-thirty in the morning,” Billy said. “Mom said everybody’s born at three-thirty in the
morning. Can that be right?”

Linda thought about that. She had beautiful violet eyes. “You were born in July,” she decided and turned
to talk to the person on her other side.



Ensign Benson ate toast, eggs, bacon, waffles; but he did not, in fact, taste a thing. He was thinking too
hard. “If astrology works,” he said, “it rules out free will.”

“Not at all,” said Hank. The heavens don’t say certainly thus and so will happen, or everybody born at
the same time in the same general area would be identical. Astrology deals in probabilities. For instance,
the astral alignment so strongly suggested Earth would make fresh contact with its Lost Colonies now that
we pretty well discounted any other possibility, but as to the exact make-up of the crew, there were
some details we couldn’t be sure of.”

“Still,” Ensign Benson said, “you’re telling me you people can read the future.”

“The probabilities,” Hank corrected.



“Of course,” Pam Stokes said, an actual real piece of bacon in one hand and her ever-present slide rule
in the other, “there are many ways to define the center of the universe.” She bit off a piece of crunchy
bacon.

“Oh, sure,” Jim Downey agreed. “And they all work out to be right here.”

Pam frowned, “This doesn’t taste like bacon.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, its----Actually, its better.”

Putting the slide rule down, she picked up a fork and had at the scrambled eggs.

Pointing, Jim said, “ What is that little stick, anyway?”

“This slide rule? It’s a sort of calculator, used before the computer came in.”

“Like the abacus?” Jim picked it up, pushed the inner pieces back and forth, watched the little lines and
numbers join and separate.

“I guess so,” Pam said, reaching for the toast, pausing in amazement when the toast flexed. “It was my
mother’s,” she explained, “and my mother’s mother’s, and my mother’s mother’s mother’s and my
mo-----”

“Very interesting,” Jim said and put it down.