"C. L. Moore - The Cold Gray God" - читать интересную книгу автора (Moore C. L)

down the Lakklan. He was headed for The Spaceman's Rest. Old Mhici, if Smith
found him in the right mood and approached him through the proper devious
channels, might have information to give about the lovely lost singer and her
strange house-and her credit at the Great Bank of Lakkjourna. Smith had small
reason to doubt her wealth, but he took no needless chances.
The Spaceman's Rest was crowded. Smith made his way through the maze of tables
toward the long bar at the end of the room, threading the crowd of hard-faced
men whose wide
diversity of races seemed to make little difference in the curious similarity
of expression which dwelt upon every face. They were quiet and watchful-eyed
and wore the indefinable air of those who live by their wits and their guns.
The low-roofed place was thick with a pungent haze from the nuari which nearly
all were smoking, and that in itself was evidence that in Mhici's place they
considered themselves secure, for nuari is mildly opiate.
Old Mhici himself came forward to the voiceless summoning in Smith's single
pale-eyed glance as it met his in the crowd about the bar. The Earthman
ordered red segir-whisky, but he did not drink it immediately.
"I know no one here," he observed in the drylander idiom, which was a flagrant
misstatement, but heavy with meaning. For the hospitable old saltlands' custom
demands that the proprietor share a drink with any stranger who comes into his
bar. It is a relic from the days when strangers were rare in the saltlands,
and is very seldom recalled in populous cities like Righa, but Mhici
understood. He said nothing, but he took the black Venusian bottle of segir by
the neck and motioned Smith toward a corner table that stood empty.
When they were settled there and Mhici had poured himself a drink, Smith took
one gulp of the red whisky and hummed the opening bars of Starless Night,
watching the old drylander's pointed, leathery features. One of Mhici's
eyebrows went up, which was the equivalent of a start of surprise in another
man.
"Starless nights," he observed, "are full of danger, Smith."
"And of pleasure sometimes, eh?"
"Ur-r! Not this one."
"Oh?"
"No. And where I do not understand, I keep away."
"You're puzzled too, eh?"
"Deeply. What happened?"
Smith told him briefly. He knew that it is proverbial never to trust a
drylander, but he felt thaf old Mhici was the
exception. And by the old man's willingness to come to the point with a
minimum of fencing and circumlocution "he knew that he must be very perturbed
by Judai's presence in Righa. Old Mhici missed little, and if he was puzzled
by her presence Smith felt that his own queer reactions to the Venusian beauty
had not been unjustified.
' 'I know the box she means,'' Mhici told him when he had finished. "There's
the man, over there by the wall. See?"
Under his brows Smith studied a lean, tall canal-dweller with a deeply scarred
face and an air of restless uneasiness. He was drinking some poisbnously green
concoction and smoking nuari so heavily that the clouds of it veiled his face.
Smith grunted contemptuously.
' 'If the box is valuable he's not putting himself into any shape to guard