"Gordon R. Dickson - The Right to Arm Bears" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

Spacial Delivery

CHAPTER 1
The Right Honorable Joshua Guy, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Dilbia, was smoking tobacco in a
pipe, an old-fashioned, villainous habit for such a conservative and respected gentleman. The
fumes from the pipe made John Tardy cough and strangle. Or perhaps it was the fumes combined with
what the Rt. Hon. Josh Guy had just said.
"Sir?" wheezed John Tardy.
"Sorry," said the dapper little diplomat. "Thought you heard me the first time." He knocked his
devil of a pipe out in a hand-carved bowl of some native Dilbian wood, where the coal continued to
smoulder and stink only slightly less objectionably than it had before. "What I said was that,
naturally, as soon as we knew you were safely drafted for the job, we let out word to the Dilbians
that you were deeply attached to the girl. In love with her, in fact."


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John gulped air. Both men were talking Dilbian to exercise the command of the language John had
had hypnoed into him on his way here from the Belt stars, and the Dilbian nickname for the missing
Earthian girl sociologist came from his lips automatically,
"With this Greasy Face?"
"Miss Ty Lamorc," corrected Joshua, smoothly slipping into Basic and then out again. "Greasy Face
to Dilbians, of course. But you mustn't pay too much attention to the apparent value of these
Dilbian nicknames. The two old Dilbian gentlemen you're about to meetтАФDaddy Shaking Knees, Mayor
of Humrog, here, by the way, and Two AnswersтАФaren't at all the sort they might sound like from
name alone. Daddy Shaking Knees got his name from holding up one end of a timber one day in an
emergency. After about forty-five minutes someone noticed his knees starting to tremble a bit. And
Two Answers is not a liar, as you might expect, but a wily sort who can come up with more than one
solution to a problem."
"I see," said John.
"Miss Lamorc is quite a fine young woman. I would not at all be ashamed to have her for a
daughter, myself. Lots of character."
"Oh, I'm sure she has," said John, hastily. "I'm not objecting to the situation here. I don't want
you to think that. After all, the draft is necessary in emergency situations, particularly in
areas where we're in close competition with the Hemnoids. But I don't understand what this has to
do with my decathlon record? I thought I'd put all that sports business behind me after the last
Olympics. As you know, I'm actually a fully qualified biochemist, and . . ."
"Names," said Joshua, "have their chief value around here as an index to what the Dilbians think
of you. I, myself, now, am referred to as Little Bite; and you will undoubtedly be christened
yourself with a Dilbian nickname, shortly."
"Me!" said John, startled. He thought of his own red hair which surmounted an athletically stocky
body. He had always hated to be called Red.
"It should not be too humiliating, provided you are careful not to make yourself ridiculous.
Heinie, nowтАФ"
"I beg your pardon?"
"I beg yours," said Josh, starting to refill his pipe. "I should have used his full name of Heiner
Schlaff." He puffed fresh clouds of smoke into the air of the small, neat office with the log
walls. "He lost his head first time he stepped out alone on the street. A Dilbian from one of the