"Brunner, John - The Repairmen of Cyclops" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brunner John)

pered body which was all keel for the muscles driving
those fans, perfectly streamlined; a mere twitch, a single
shrug of those muscles would hurl it torpedo-swift on
anything else which swam the waters of Cyclops, and
jaws which could open to engulf a man would clamp
serrated rows of fangs into, and through, the victim. The
bite killed, and the Idller forgot. In summer, it was never
hungry. It swallowed what its )aws held, and that suf-
ficed until the next kill, minutes later.
Kolb silenced the yammering alarms in his mind and
lined up the sights of his gun rock-steady on the centre
of the maw.
And then, with the distance closing to two hundred
yards, a hundred and fifty, there came the boom.
It rocked the skimmer. It starded the wolfshark. It was
the noise of a Corps Galactica spacecraft braking at the
edge of atmosphere to put down at the repair base.
By a reflex not even the danger of death could over-
rule, ex-spaceman Justin Kolb glanced up, and the sun
shone full on his wholeface visor, triggering and over-
loading the glare response, so that he was blind. He cried
out, his hand closing on the trigger of his gun. The har-
poon whistled wide of a target, and the wolfshark
charged.
During the flight Maddalena Santos had mostly- sat
staring at nothing, turning over and over in her mind the
decision which now confronted her: to stay on, or not,
in the Patrol Service.
Three other passengers were aboardpersonnel from
an airless Corps base further out towards the limits of
the explored galaxy, on rotating local leave and very ex-
cited about it. Two of them were men. The fact that
these men looked at her once only told her something
about the effect of the last twenty years on her appear-
ance.
It was one thing to know that she was assured of an-
other two centuries of life. It was another to realise on
this first visit to civilisation in so long a time how deep
the impact of two decades on a barbarian world had
gone.
She was assured of her longevity by the Patrol's pay-
scale; in a galaxy where the older worlds were so rich it
literally made no difference whether a given individual
worked or not, it required either accidental dedication or
a tempting bait to enlist volunteers for the necessary
drudgery of governmental service.
Not that you can really call it government, Maddalena
reminded herself listlessly. It's more like herding cattle.
And lazy cattle, at that.
The other branches of government service paid at