"Alan Dean Foster - Flinx 5 - Flinx in Flux" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Yellow standby lights gave way to green readies.
Like any modern piece of machinery, the crawler took only a moment to run a
self‑check and declare itself healthy. That done, Flinx turned up the recycler a
notch and dug out a towel to wipe his face. You had to be careful when changing
environments. While the air‑conditioning unit he wore had kept his body
comfortable, his face had been exposed to the air. Perspiration poured from his
forehead and cheeks, ran down his neck under his shirt collar. The combination
of sweat and air‑conditioning could bring on a cold faster than anything else
known to man.
It was a matter of choice. He could have worn a helmet and insulated himself
completely from the local climate, but somehow that seemed the wrong thing to do
at the minidrags' leave‑taking. So he had left the helmet in the crawler and had
tolerated the heat and humidity for the short hike through the jungle.
Putting the soaked towel aside, he downed a long swig of chilled fruit juice
from the driver's feedline before starting the engine. The electric drive hummed
smoothly beneath him. Pip slid off his shoulder to coil around an equipment rack
next to the seat behind him. If she felt sad or melancholy at the loss of her
five offspring, she gave no sign of it.
Scrap was less willing to find a seat. Despite Flinx's persistent efforts to
dislodge it, the young minidrag insisted on clinging to his wrist. Finally Flinx
gave up and put the crawler in motion. The adolescent was not heavy, and before
long he would get bored and move off by himself.
The path he had bulldozed in from the river was easy to follow. Fast‑sprouting
jungle plants were already fighting for their share of the newly esposed route


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to the sky. He turned a tight curve, bending the crawler in the middle, to work
his way around a tree three meters thick. The vehicle articulated vertically
when he followed that maneuver by driving down and through a dry streambed.
Now that he had accomplished what he had come to Alaspin for, he was forced to
contemplate what he was going to do next. Life was no longer simple. Once it had
been, back on Moth, when all he had had to worry about was keeping dry and
getting enough to eat and maybe swiping a few luxuries now and then to help out
Mother Mastiff when business was slow. The past four years had complicated his
life incredibly. He had seen and experienced more than most men saw and
experienced in a lifetime, let alone adolescent boys.
Not that he was a boy anymore, he reminded himself. He had grown physically as
well as mentally. Nearly nine centimeters, in fact. Decisions were no longer
easy to make, choices no longer straightforward. Being nineteen carried with it
a lot of responsibility, for him more than for most. Not to mention the
emotional baggage that automatically went with it without right of refusal.
The only problem with seeing a lot, he mused as he guided the crawler through
the Ingre jungle, was that he was not happy with most of what he had seen. In
general, both man and thranx had been a disappointment to him. Too many
individuals were ready and willing to sell out their principles and friends for
the right price. Even basically good people like the merchant Maxim Malaika were
essentially looking out for their own best interests. Mother Mastiff was no