"Zach Hughes - Mother Lode" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

She took a moving sidewalk to a shopping complex and marveled at the
richness of goods on display. After buying a few luxuries for herself and
gifts for her father, she ate alone in a beautifully decorated little
restaurant that specialized in the cuisine of the Tigian planets, drank two
glasses of a beautifully dry Tigian wine.

The communications blink routes to New Earth were still jammed. She
had a lovely night's sleep in her room on the B.O.Q. with the windows
open. She had to bundle up under heavy covers, but the unladen sweetness
of the air made it worth it. She had a leisurely breakfast next morning,
tried to call New Earth again without success, left the B.O.Q., grabbed a
taxi, and was soon aboard a passenger liner enroute to Tigian I, II, and III;
Trojan V; Delos; and New Earth. The bed in her stateroom was prepared.
She stripped to her singlet, punched a Do-Not-Disturb message into her
communicator, and slept.

Her stateroom was, when compared to her quarters aboard Rimfire,
luxurious. There was no limit to the amount of water she could use, so she
filled the bathtub until she could slide down and soak with only her face
showing. She lolled in the bath for an hour and emerged feeling wrinkled
but good. The food in the ship's dining room was excellent. Her fellow
passengers seemed to be a cross section of United Planets society,
although most of them were considerably older than she. She was polite
enough, but made it clear that she was not interested in socializing. When
the ship cleared the three Tigian planets and settled in for the extended
trip to Trojan, the captain invited her to the bridge. He was a
distinguished man with gray hair and grayer eyes, a veteran of the Service.
He asked questions about the circumnavigation.

"Incredibly dull," she said, "after the first few thousand parsecs."

They indulged in did-you-know exchanges. Both of them had known
Dean Richards, first captain of the Rimfire. Neither of them had ever met
Pete and Jan Jaynes, who had earned a huge bonus by bringing Rimfire
back from entrapment in dimensionless space during the big ship's
maiden voyage when her blink generator malfunctioned.

The conversation was pleasant, but it caused her to wonder if she'd
made the proper decision in leaving the Service. She knew and understood
people like the polite, sophisticated man who captained the luxury liner.
The civilians who laughed, clinked glasses, dropped flatware, talked at the
top of their voices in the dining room seemed to be a separate species.

But, she told herself, it would be different when she was back among
her own kind on her home planet with her father. That thought sustained
her as she rested in her stateroom, hydrated her skin in the bath, ate more
than she should have eaten in the dining room, explored the spacetown
around Trojan V's port. And then she was looking down on home. Terra II.
New Earth. No uncomfortable space-suited transfers to shuttles for