"Timothy Zahn - Star Song and Other Stories" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

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Point Man
Everyone, my mother used to tell me, had a special talent. Every human being,
in
one way or another, stood head and shoulders above all those around him. It
was,
she'd firmly believed, part of what made us human; one of the few things that
stood us apart from the lower animals and even from the sophisticated alien
hive
minds that plied the galaxy.
She never told me just what she thought my talent was while I was growing up,
of
course. At the time I figured that she simply didn't want to prejudice me.
Looking back from the perspective of five decades, it has gradually become
apparent that she hadn't told me what my talent was because she was never
able
to find any. But she was too kind to tell me outright that I was so uniformly
average... and so I left home and spent thirty solid years looking for
something
in which I could excel.
Eventually, I found it. I found that I had a genuine and unique knack for
being
at the wrong place at the wrong time.
I remember vividly the day that conclusion suddenly came to me; remember
almost
as well the solid month afterwards that I fought it. But eventually I had to
give in and accept it as truth. There were just too many instances scattered
throughout my life to blame on coincidence and accident. There was the time I
walked into my college room just as my roommate was frying his cortex with an
illegal and badly overset brain-stretch stimulator. I was eventually
exonerated
of all blame, but the trauma and stigma were just as bad as if I'd been
thrown
out of school, and eventually led to the same result. I joined the Services
and
had worked my way up to a very promising position in starship engineering when
I
was transferred to the Burma... three months before the ship's first officer
attempted a mutiny and damn near made it. Again, the wrong place at the wrong
time, and this time the stigma of association effectively ended my Services
career. I eventually went into the merchant fleet, kicking around various
ships
until my special damn talent landed me in another innocent mess and I was
forced
to move on.
So given my history, I shouldn't have been surprised to be on the Volga's
bridge
when it broke out of hyperspace on that particularly nasty evening.
I shouldn't even have been on the bridge, for starters. That fact alone