"Gordon R. Dickson - The Outposter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Ahead of Jarl Rakkal, some eight people ahead in the line, was what seemed to be a child, a young girl
of perhapseight. But there were no children among the lotteried. Actu-ally, what appeared a small girl
was a midget, and unlike Jarl she was not at all wondering how she had ended up in the line. Her wonder
was that she had not landed in such a line many years before, since variations from the physical norm
were caught in the lottery more often than average people. Her name was Lily Betaugh, and she had set
out to be a university teacher of philosophy of such stature that she would be voted exemption from the
lottery.

She had in fact become a full professor of philosophy, at theUniversityofBelgrade , but she had never
become either popular or famous enough to be voted exemption. Some-time during the last few years
she had real-ized that she never would. She was brilliantтАФ very, very brilliant. But she wasn't the best,
and only the best got exemptions.

Some thirty yards farther up the line of drafted colonistsтАФalmost level with the unit from which newly
graduated Outposter Mark Ten Roos was now alighting, on the far side of the fenceтАФwas Age
Hammerschold. He was a master cabinetmaker, overage for union pro-tection but by a year and a half
still young enough for the lottery, and now his chief mental activity was to congratulate himself continually
that his wife had died three years before. The thought filled him with something like gleeтАФit was as if he,
personally, had suc-cessfully cheated the authorities out of one body and one soul by having had a wife
who died before he himself could be drafted. He waited his turn on the boarding ladder lead-ing to the
colonists' ship entrance almost with indifference. He was close enough to hear what they were saying on
the other side of the high fence with the barbed wire top, but he paid no attention. As far as he was
concerned, the regular passengers were like so many exotic animals with which he had nothing in
common.

"Miss," the shorter of the ship's guards on the far side of the fence was saying, "you don't understand."

"Oh, I understand," answered the girl pas-senger he was talking to. She extended a slim right arm and
pulled back the cuff on its semi-transparent black sleeve. Strapped to her wrist was the small matchbox
shape of a wrist gun. "But I've got a weapon."

For the first time, Mark Ten Roos, the young outposter who had just arrived, took a close look at her.
She was no older than Mark, tall and slimly athletic, with a shoulder-length mane of black hair bound
with a silver band that held it back from the delicate oval of her face. Her eyes sparkled now, just on the
edge of an explosion of anger, and the little wrist gun had a pattern of red and green jewels set in its case.

"Yes, miss," said one of the two guards, "I know. But that's not the point. Ship's regula-tion is for all
passengers to wearside arms" тАФ he held up the ship-issued belt and weapon he had been offering her,
as if she were a judge before whom he was presenting evidence. "It's captain's regulations, miss."

It was curious, Mark thought, that the guards were being so unusually patient with the girl. He wondered
who she was. No sales-man's wife would have received such kid-glove treatment, and in any case she
looked too young to be one of the embarking wives. But even a member of the staff of an
admiral-general, like the one named on the ship's transport schedule Mark had examined earlier, was
hardly likely to rate such patient handling.
 Clearly she could not be as mere a person as a salesman's wife or even a high-ranking staff member.
She could only be, like the admiral-general himself, a member of the so-called Five ThousandтАФthat
rarefied social aristoc-racy of an overpopulated Earth, among whom unlimited wealth and unlimited
power were taken for granted; that select commu-nity so isolated from the rest of the people of the