"de Camp, L Sprague - Nothing in the Rules UC" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

"You mean you don't eat anything hot?"
She made a face. "'Ot food? No, I do not like it. To us it is-"
"Listen, Mark! I hear the W. S. A. is going to throw a postseason meet in April for novices only-"
Vining's dessert lay before him a full minute before he noticed it. He was too busy thinking how delightful Miss Delfoiros' accent was.
When dinner was over, Laird said, "Listen, Mark, you know something about these laws against owning gold? Well, look here-" He led the way to a candy box on a table in the living room. The box contained, not candy, but gold and silver coins. Laird handed the lawyer several of them. The first one he examined was a silver crown, bearing the inscription "Carolus II Dei Gra" encircling the head of
England's Merry Monarch with a wreath in his hair-or, more probably, in his wig. The second was an eighteenth-cent~ury Spanish dollar. The third was a Louis d'Or.
"I didn't know you went in for coin collecting, Herb," said Vifling. "I suppose these are all genuine?"
"They're genuine all right. But I'm not collecting 'em. You might say I'm taking 'em in trade. I have a chance to sell ten thousand bathing caps, if I can take payment in those things."
"I shouldn't think the U. S. Rubber Company would like the idea much."
"That's just the point. What'll I do with 'em after I get 'em? Will the government put me in jail for having 'em?"
"You needn't worry about that. I don't think the law covers old coins, though I'll look it up to make sure. Better call up the American Numismatic Society-they're in the phone book-and they can tell you how to dispose of them. But look here, what the devil is this? Ten thousand bathing caps to be paid for in pieces-of-eight? I never heard of such a thing."
"That's it exactly. Just ask the little lady here." Laird turned to lantha, who was nervously trying to signal him to keep quiet. "The deal's her doing."
"I did - . . did-" She looked as if she were going to cry. "Erbert, you should not have said that. You see," she said to Vining, "we do not like to 'ave a lot to do with people. Always it causes us troubles."
"Who," asked Vining, "do you mean by 'we'?"
She shut her mouth obstinately. Vining almost melted, but his legal instincts came to the surface. If you don't get a grip on yourself, he thought, you'll be in love with her in another five minutes, and that might be a disaster. He said firmly:
"Herb, the more I see of this business, the crazier it looks. Whatever's going on, you seem to be trying to get me into it. But I'm damned if I'll let you unless I know what it's all about."
"Might as well tell him, Iantha," said Laird. "He'll know when he sees you swim tomorrow, anyhow."
She said: "You will not tell the newspaper men, Mr. Vining?"
"No, I won't say anything to anybody."
"You promise?"
"Of course. You can depend on a lawyer to keep things under his hat."
"Under his- I suppose you mean, not to tell. So, look." She reached down and pulled up the lower end of the blanket.
Vining looked. Where he expected to see feet, there was a pair of horizontal flukes, like those of a porpoise.

Louis Connaught's having kittens, when he saw what his rival coach had sprung on him, can thus be easily explained. First he doubted his own senses; then he doubted whether there was any justice in the world.
Meanwhile, Mark Vining proudly pushed lantha's wheelchair in among the cluster of judges and timekeepers at the starting end of the pool. lantha herself, in a bright green bathing cap, held her blanket around her shoulders, but the slate-gray tail with its flukes was plain for all to see. The skin of the tail was smooth and the flukes were horizontal; artists who show mermaids with scales and a vertical tail fin, like a fish's, simply do not know their zoology.
"All right, all right," bellowed Laird. "Don't crowd around. Everybody get back to where they belong. Everybody, please."
One of the spectators, leaning over the rail of the balony to see, dropped a fountain pen into the pool. One of Connaught's girls, a Miss Black, dove in after it.
Ogden Wambach, the referee, poked a finger at the skin of the tail. He was a well-groomed, gray-haired man.
"Laird," he said, "is this a joke?"
"Not at all. She's entered in the back stroke and all the free styles, just like any other club member. She's even registered with the

"But . . . but. . . I mean, is it alive? Is it real?"
lantha spoke up. "Why do you not ask me those questions, Mr. . . . Mr. . . . I do not know you-"
"Good grief," said Wambaeh. "It talks! I'm the referee, Miss-"
"Delfoiros. lantha Delfoiros."
"My word. Upon my word. That means-let's see-Violet Porpoise-tail, doesn't it? Deiphis plus oura-"
"You know Greek? Oh, 'ow nice!" She broke into a string of dimotiki.
Wambach gulped a little. "Too fast for me, I'm afraid. And that's modern Greek, isn't it?"
"Why, yes. I am modern, am I not?"
"Dear me. I suppose so. But is that tail really real? I mean, it's not just a piece of costumery?"
"Oh, but yes." lantha threw off the blanket and waved her flukes. Everyone in the pool seemed to have turned into a pair of eyeballs to which a body and a pair of legs were vaguely attached.
"Dear me," said Ogden Wambach. "Where are my glasses? You understand, I just want to make sure there's nothing spurious about this."
Mrs. Santalucia, a muscular-looking lady with a visible mustache and fingers webbed down to the first joint, said, "You mean I gotta swim against her?"
Louis Connaught had been sizzling like a dynamite fuse. "You can't do it!" he shrilled. "This is a woman's meet! I protest!"
"So what?" said Laird.
"But you can't enter a fish in a woman's swimming meet! Can you, Mr. Wambach?"
Mark Vining spoke up. He had just taken a bunch of papers clipped together out of his pocket and was running through them.
"Miss Delfoiros," he asserted, "is not a fish. She's a mammal."
"How do you figure that?" yelled Connaught.