"Alan Dean Foster - Humanx 5 - Sentenced To Prism" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

wind, heavy rain, and lightning were exhila-rating. Naturally, the weather
didn't affect him at all because, like everyone else on Samstead, he was
wearing
a suit.
He happened to be clad in a developmental engineer's duty suit, status
semiformal. Its internal stabilizers allowed him to stride without strain into
a
seventy‑kph gale. Evap-orators and dispersers kept his face visor clear.
The
thermosensitive weave kept him warm and dry. The light, flexible material was
dyed dark green. Black stripes ran diagonally across his chest, left shoulder,
and left leg. Two bands of lighter green crossed his right shoulder. Evan was
partial to subdued attire.
The street was crowded with citizens rushing about their daily errands. Each
wore a uniquely decorated suit and none paid any attention to the near
hurricane
battering the city.
Suits were comforting not only to those who wore them but also to everyone
else,
since a suit reflected not only its wearer's personal taste, but also his or
her
profession, wealth, or private interests. Evan passed one woman who was having
trouble controlling her offspring, who were fiddling with their stabilizers in
order to float freely in the wind a meter above the pavement. He could hear
her
shouts clearly over the omnidirectional universal com-municator. She was late
for some kind of business lunch and didn't have time to indulge naughty
children. Besides which if they didn't settle down, behave, and walk
prop-erly,
they were going to miss ballet class.
That threat convinced the youngsters to reset their stabilizers. They dropped
gently to the street and toddled along silently in their mother's
wake‑though
every so often the boy would rise a couple of centimeters off the ground until
a
sharp backward. glance from his mother would force him to return quickly to
the
pavement.
Evan smiled at the byplay between mother and son, turned another corner, and
found himself confronting a towering structure with a concave facade. He
started
through the central courtyard toward the imposing entrance. Over the doorway
was
the legend THE AURORA GROUP, rendered in blue crystal. In the center of the
open
courtyard and dominating it was a three‑story‑tall foun-tain in
the shape of the
company logo, three worlds form-ing a pyramid. The fountain played smoothly
despite the constant wind. The water was contained by carefully pro-grammed
hydrostatic charges.