"M. John Harrison - The Centauri Device" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harrison John M)

for John Price
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PRINTING HISTORY
Doubleday edition published November 2974 Bantam edition / August 1980
Alt of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to
actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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Copyright ┬й 1974 by M. John Harrtson.
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And they, so perfect is their misery, Not once perceive their foul
disfigurement. .. . тАФJohn Milton, Comus,
ONE
Truck, Tiny, and Angina Seng
It was St. Crispin's Eve on Sad al Ban IV when Captain John Truck, impelled by
something he was forced to describe to himself as "sentiment," decided to
visit the Spacer's Rave, on the corner of Proton Alley and Circuit (that
chilly junction where the higher class of port lady goes to find her
customers).
"Don't accept any cargo," he told his bosun as he prepared to leave My Ella
Speed, "for at least two weeks. Especially don't accept any vegetable seeds. I
pill never haul pumpkins again, any shape or form."
"What's a pumpkin?" asked the bosun, who was a Chromian dwarf called Fix. He
was good with an axтАФor so he saidтАФbut backward.
"A pumpkin is what your head is," explained John Truck smugly. "Children wear
them for the same reason you have filed your teeth.
"Don't forget, no vegetable seeds."
And with a jaunty wave, he quit the ship.
He reached the Alley by way of Bread Street and East Thing, a damp wind
tangling his long hair. He walked with his shoulders hunched and his head bent
as if he were bored with it all (which he was, to the
2 The Centaur/ Device
extent that anybody is), his tight snateskin combat jacket and big leather hat
straight out of the questionable past of the Galaxy.