"Chalker, Jack L - DG1 - The River of the Dancing Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

She chuckled dryly. "College is all well and good and some
of it's interesting, but if your degree's not in business, law,
medicine, or engineering, the paper's only good for about thirty-
eight hundred -- that's what I still owe on those loans, and it'll
be a cold day in hell before they see a penny. They track you
down all over, too -- use collection agents. So you can't get
credit, can't get a loan, none of that. I got one job teaching
junior high English for a year -- but they cut back and laid me
off. Only time I ever really enjoyed life."

"So you been goin' around from job to job ever since?"

"For a while. But a couple years of working hamburger
joints and all those other minimum-wage, minimum-life jobs
gets to you. I finally sat down one day and decided it was fate,
or destiny, or something. I was getting older, and all I could
see was myself years later, sitting in a rented slum shared with
a couple of other folks just like me, getting quickies from the
night manager. So I figured I would find a man, marry him,




8 THE RIVER OF DANCING GODS

and let him pay my bills while I got into the cooking and baby

business."

"Well, it's a job like any other and has a pretty long history,"

he noted. "Somebody's got to do it -- otherwise the government

will do that, too."

She managed a wan smile at the remark. "Yeah, well, that's

what I told myself, but there are many ways to go about it.
You can meet a guy, date, fall in love, really commit yourself --
both of you. That might work. But just to go out in desperation
and marry the first guy who comes along who'll have you --

that's disaster."

"Works the other way, too, honey," he responded. "That's

why I'm paying five hundred a month in rehabilitation money --
that's what they call alimony these days in liberal states that
abolished alimony -- and child support. And she's living with
another guy who owns an auto-repair shop and is doing pretty