"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

eeeeeeeee-eeelp!" God only knows where S and R
sampled the sound effect.
I was stunned when Sears and Roebuck told me and
Arlene that the practical joke was the only universal
form of humor throughout the galaxy. It was a sad day
for me. I had hoped that galactic civilization would
have progressed somewhere beyond the emotional
level of a thirteen-year-old.
But it brought up an interesting point: was it
possible the Freds were simply playing an elaborate
and unfunny practical prank on us when they invaded
first Phobos, then Mars, then Earth itself? Maybe they
considered the humans who fought back to be a
bunch of humorless bastards who couldn't take a joke!
"No, that's without sane," said Sears and Roebuck.
"The practicals are unallowed to damageate the vic-
tim or they lose their wisdom."
"Their wisdom?"
Sears and Roebuck looked at each other; they put
their Popeyelike hands on each head and gently
pumped each other back and forth, a mannerism that
Arlene and I had decided, during the trip, was their
way of displaying frustration at our language. "What
it is, they lose their cleverness. They are infunny is
how you say it."
"Okay, I get it. Well, joke or not, we didn't like it,
and the Freds are going to find out just how much we
didn't like it when that cargo door begins to grind
open."
Four days before landing, the Fred ship began its
automatic deceleration; all of a sudden, we had more
than a full Earth gravity for'ard, once again giving us
a weird, double-heavy vector toward the outer corner
of the room. Arlene did some calculations and figured
that the ship was actually accelerating at about ninety-
six g's—that's what it took to decelerate from our
velocity relative to Fredworld to match orbit in four
days! So there must have been the mother of all
inertial damping fields to dissipate that force in the
form of heat around the ship. We would probably
have appeared star-white to an infrared viewer—a big
blazing flare warning the Fred of our imminent arriv-
al, in case they'd forgotten.
All good things must come to an end. The night
before we were to land, when we still had not been
hailed or attacked en route by the Freds, Arlene spent
the night nestled in my arms. It wasn't the first time
we had spent the night in the same bunk, stripped to
our skivvies; some people in Fox Company had never
believed us that we never had sex—but it's true. I