"Robert A. Heinlein - Have Space Suit Will Travel" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

Have Space Suit Will Travel -- Robert A. Heinlein

(Version 2002.03.20 -- Done)


Chapter 1

You see, I had this space suit.
How it happened was this way:
"Dad," I said, "I want to go to the Moon."
"Certainly," he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K.
Jerome's Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.
I said, "Dad, please! I'm serious."
This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, "I said it was
all right. Go ahead."
"Yes...but how?"
"Eh?" He looked mildly surprised. "Why, that's your problem, Clifford."
Dad was like that. The time I told him I wanted to buy a bicycle he
said, "Go right ahead," without even glancing up -- so I had gone to the money
basket in the dining room, intending to take enough for a bicycle. But there
had been only eleven dollars and forty-three cents in it, so about a thousand
miles of mowed lawns later I bought a bicycle. I hadn't said anymore to Dad
because if money wasn't in the basket, it wasn't anywhere; Dad didn't bother
with banks -- just the money basket and one next to it marked "UNCLE SAM," the
contents of which he bundled up and mailed to the government once a year. This
caused the Internal Revenue Service considerable headache and once they sent a
man to remonstrate with him.
First the man demanded, then he pleaded. "But, Dr. Russell, we know your
background. You've no excuse for not keeping proper records."
"But I do," Dad told him. "Up here." He tapped his forehead.
"The law requires written records."
"Look again," Dad advised him. "The law can't even require a man to read
and write. More coffee?"
The man tried to get Dad to pay by check or money order. Dad read him
the fine print on a dollar bill, the part about "legal tender for all debts,
public and private."
In a despairing effort to get something out of the trip he asked Dad
please not to fill in the space marked "occupation" with "Spy".
"Why not?"
"What? Why, because you aren't -- and it upsets people."
"Have you checked with the F.B.I.?"
"Eh? No."
"They probably wouldn't answer. But you've been very polite. I'll mark
it 'Unemployed Spy.' Okay?"
The tax man almost forgot his brief case. Nothing fazed Dad, he meant
what he said, he wouldn't argue and he never gave in. So when he told me I
could go to the Moon but the means were up to me, he meant just that. I could
go tomorrow -- provided I could wangle a billet in a space ship.
But he added meditatively, "There must be a number of ways to get to the
Moon, son. Better check 'em all. Reminds me of this passage I'm reading.