"Duane, Diane - Tos - Spock's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

to talk shop, it was in the gentlest sort of way.
One night someone happened to mention Grainne, the
pirate queen who raged up and down the Irish
Sea in the first Elizabeth's day, and it had seemed
natural enough to talk a little about Orion pirates and
their depredations,
and the deplorable trade in green slave girls.
Or another time someone else might admit how his
five-times' great-grandfather had been one of "the
Gentlemen"...for smuggling had been more or less the
national sport, some generations back-and if Jim could
put on an innocent face and tell them a little about
how one might get Romulan ale across the
Neutral Zone without attracting the attention of
Customs and Excise, well, it was the least he could
do ....
"He pulls the slowest pint in the county,
and that's a fact," Riona said from just behind Jim, as
she picked her way around the chair and flopped in the
other chimney-corner seat. "It's a virtue,"
Erevan said, coming around the other side and sitting in the
chair next to Jim. He was carrying a perfectly
full pint glass of Guinness, which he put down with
exaggerated care on the table between them. "Agree with
me, Jimmy boy."
"I agree with you," Jim said immediately. "What
am I agreeing with?"
j "You cannot pull a pint of this stuff fast,"
Erevan said. "All those little air bubbles, phah,
they getinto it and ruin the flavor."
"When you're dying of thirst, the flavor doesn't
enter into it if it's half an hour before you can drink
it," Riona said, and drank, and got herself a
beige moustache from the luxuriant head. She wiped
it off surreptitiously. "Ronan ought to do what
they do in town, and pull pints ahead of time, and
leave them on the shelf to settle down."
"Slops," Erevan said. "That is slops.
Jimmy, ignore this woman."
"You'd hit me if I didn't," Jim said.
Then added, "Come to think of it, you'd hit me if I
did."
j "You be still, then; I'm discoursin'. Slops.
Say you have a barman on the bad, and closing time
comes, and he hasn't sold those pints: what then?
What's to keep him from pouring them back into the tank
disforthe next day, eh? Slops." Erevan said the word
with great satisfaction. "Each drinker to his own
pint, and if you have to wait, that's the price of
quality, and besides, it's worth waiting for."