"Connie Willis - Futures Imperfect" - читать интересную книгу автора (Willis Connie)

and meet the new loaner you probably went off and left 'em lying in camp. What's her name again?
Evangeline?"

"Evelyn Parker," he said. "I was not in a hurry."

"How come you ran up two-fifty in fines breaking camp, then?"

"Because Bult's on some kind of fining spree the last few days," he said. "And the only hurry I've
been in is to finish up this expedition before every dime of our wages goes for fines, which looks
like a lost cause now that you lost the binocs."

"You weren't in a hurry yesterday," I said. "Yesterday you were all ready to ride fifty kloms north on
the off-chance of running into Wulfmeier, and then C.J. calls and tells you the new loaner's in and
her name's Eleanor, and all of a sudden you can't get home fast enough."

"Evelyn," Carson said, getting red in the face, "and I still say Wulfmeier's surveying that sector. You
just don't like loaners."

"You're right about that," I said. "They're more trouble than they're worth." I've never met a loaner
yet that was worth taking along, and the females are the worst.

They come in one variety: whiners. They spend every minute of the expedition complaining—about
the outdoor plumbing and the dust and Bult and having to ride ponies and everything else they can
think of. The last one spent the whole expedition yowling about "terrocentric enslaving imperialists,"
meaning Carson and me, and how we'd corrupted the "simple, noble indigenous sentients," meaning
Bult, which was bad enough, but then she latched onto Bult and told him our presence "defiled the
very atmosphere of the planet," and Bult started trying to fine us for breathing.

"I laid the binocs right next to your bedroll, Fin," Carson said, reaching behind him to rummage in
his pack.

"Well, I never saw 'em."

"That's because you're half-blind," he said. "You can't even see a cloud of dust when it's coming
right at you."

Well, as a matter of fact, we'd been arguing long enough that now I could, a kicked-up line of
pinkish cloud close to the ridge.

"What do you think it is? A dust tantrum?" I said, even though a tantrum would've been meandering
all over the place, not keeping to a line.

"I don't know," he said, putting his hand up to shade his eyes. "A stampede maybe."

The only fauna around here were luggage, and they didn't stampede in dry weather like this, and

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Futures Imperfect

anyway the cloud wasn't wide enough for a stampede. It looked like the dust churned up by a rover,