"Joe Haldeman - A Tangled Web" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Joe)

"Hello, Pete." I shook his hand once. "What brings you here? Hartford business?" Pete
was also an interpreter.
тАФOh, no, he said in Arabic. Only journeying.
тАФKnock it off, I said in Serbo-Croatian. тАФIsn't your native language English? I added in
Greek.
"Sure it is. Yours?"
"English or Spanish. Have a seat."
I smacked my lips twice at Slim Joan, and she came over with a menu. "To be eating you
want?"
"Nyet," he said. "Vodka." I told her I'd take another. "So what are you doing here?" Pete
asked.
"Business."
"Hartford?"
"Nope."
"Secret."
"That's right." Actually, they hadn't said anything about its being secret. But I knew Peter
Lafitte. He wasn't just passing through.
We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the !tangs. We had to smile when he
explained to her how to decide-which public bathroom to use when. This was important to
humans, he said. Slim Joan came with the drinks and Pete paid for both, a bad sign.
"How did that Spica business finally turn out?" he asked.
"Badly." Lafitte and I had worked together on a partition-of-rights hearing on Spica IV,
with the Confederaci├│n actually bucking Hartford over an alien-rights problem. "I couldn't
get the humans to understand that the minerals had souls, and I couldn't get the natives to
believe that refining the minerals didn't affect their spiritual status. It came to a show of
force, and the natives backed down. I wouldn't like to be there in twenty years, though."
"Yeah. I was glad to be recalled. Arcturus all over.
"That's what I tried to tell them." Arcturus wasn't a regular stop any more, not since a ship
landed and found every human artistically dismembered. "You're just sightseeing?"
"This has always been one of my favorite planets." "Nothing to do."
"Not for you city boys. The fishing is great, though." Ah ha. "Ocean fishing?"
"Best in the Confederaci6n."
"I might give it a try. Where do you get a boat?"
He smiled and looked directly at me. "Little coastal village, Pa'an!al."
Smack in the middle of the tribal territory I'd be dickering for. I dutifully repeated the
information into my ring.
I changed the subject and we talked about nothing for a while. Then I excused myself,
saying I was time-lagging and had to get some sleep. Which was true enough, since the
shuttle had stayed on Armpit time, and I was eight hours out of phase with III. But I bounced
straight to the Hartford courier's office.
The courier on duty was Estelle Dorring, whom I knew slightly. I cut short the
pleasantries. "How long to get a message to Earth?"
She studied the clocks on the wall. "You're out of luck if you want it hand-carried. I'm not
going to Armpit until tomorrow. Two days on the shuttle and I'll miss the Earth run by half a
day.
"If broadcast is all right, you can beam to Armpit and the courier there can take it on the
Twosday run. That leaves in seventy-two minutes. Call it nineteen minutes' beam time. You
know what you want to say?"
"Yeah. Set it up." I sat down at the customers' console.