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

fully prepared r61e in the local society. . . and she was
on her way to Cyclops, a planet she had never conceived
she might want to visit.
Yet she had welcomed the reasonless order to come
here before proceeding on leave. The delay gave her
time to arrive at the decision she had postponed so long:
stay on, ask for transfer to some lower-paying )ob, or
resign?
She thought enviously of Gus Langenschmidt, the Pa-
trol Major who had maintained the beat including her
assigned world when she first went there; he was aging,
greying, even running to fat when she last saw him, yet
because he could think of no better purpose to which to
devote his accrued longevity, he was continuing far be-
yond the maximum service-time which qualified for ten-
to-one pay. Five centuries was the limit of credit Fifty
years in the Patrol.
More than the total of years Fve yet lived, Maddalena
reflected. How is Gus? Where is he? It would have been
easier to endure my job if I'd .known he was still going
to call two or three times a yearbut they 'pulled him off
his beat to do something else when he topped the limit,
and I could never like his successor so well.
The communicators announced the imminence of
planetfall. The whisper of air began on the hull, like the
drumming of scores of marching feet. Maddalena leaned
back and closed her eyes, struggling once more with the
irresoluble problem. She scarcely noticed the actual land-
ing period, although her fellow passengers were chatter-
ing and joking and exchanging snippets of information
about Cyclops. A rough world, they thought it was.
Rough world.' Maddalena echoed silently. These soft-
handed chair-warmers should go where I've just come
from.'
And yet...
Her mind drifted back two decades on the instant. "A
predatory kind of world"that was the description she
had been given when it was first learned Cyclopeans
were behind the interference with a ZRP which she had
cancelled out by an inspired improvisation.
What did they want her here for, anyway? Why in
the galaxy had that message come through at the Corps
base where she had been trying to decide whether to go
all the way home to Earth for her leave-year, instructing
that she be sent to Cyclops on the next available flight?
The answer turned up the moment the locks were
opened on the landing-groundor rather, pontoon. Cy-
clops, having so much water, had correspondingly little
dry ground available for parking spaceships. More than si
dozen vessels were in view from the seat in which she