"Grant Naylor - Red Dwarf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Naylor Grant)

Casino.
Lister flicked on the 'For Hire' sign, and decided to take the hopper down
Central and back towards Mimas docks. He slipped the gear into jump, and
braced himself. The hopper leapt into the air, and landed with a spine-
juddering crunch two hundred yards down Eastern Avenue. The hopper's rear legs
retracted into the engine housing, then hammered into the ground, propelling
him another two hundred yards. As it smacked into the tarmacadamed three-lane
highway, Lister's neck was forced into the hollow at the base of his skull,
further aggravating an already angry headache. The hopper's suspension was
completely shot to hell.
Lister began to wish he'd never stolen it.
Hoppers had been introduced to Mimas thirty years previously, to combat the
ludicrous congestion which had blocked the small moon's road system so badly
that an average Mimian traffic jam. could last anything up to three weeks.
People had been known to die of starvation in particularly bad ones. Hoppers,
which could leapfrog over obstructions, and spend most of their time in the
air, helped ease the problem. True, there were a fair number of mid-air
collisions, and there was always the possibility of being landed on by a
drunk-driven hopper, but, by and large, you reached your destination in the
same season you set off.
Lister watched with envy as another hopper overtook him with the easy grace of
a frolicking deer. The next landing was the worst. The hopper hit a metal dram
cover with such violence that Lister bit his cigarette in half, and the
glowing tip fell between his thighs and rolled under the seat of his pants.
Frantically, he arched his body out of the seat and tried to sweep the butt
onto the floor as the hopper leapt madly down the busy highway, like a sick
metallic kangaroo.
Something was burning.
It smelled like hair. And since he was the only thing in the hopper that had
hair, it was fairly safe to assume some part of him was on fire. Some part of
him that had hair. He liked all the parts of him that had hair. They were his
favourite bits.
His eyes searched desperately for a place to park. Forget it.
In London people parked wherever it was possible. In Paris people parked even
where it wasn't possible. On Mimas people parked on top of the people who'd
parked where it wasn't possible. Stacks of hoppers, three, sometimes four
high, lined the avenue on both sides.
A typical Saturday night on Mimas.
The thick air hung heavy with the smells and noises of a hundred mingling
cultures. The trotters, Mimian slang for 'pavements', were obscured by giant
serpents of human flesh as people wrested their way past the blinking neons of
casinos and restaurants, the on-off glare of bars and clubs; shouting.
screaming, laughing, vomiting. Astros and miners on planet leave going wallet-
bulging crazy, desperate for a good time after months of incarceration in the
giant space freighters that now hung over the moon's shuttle port.
The Earth had long been purged of all its valuable mineral resources.
Humankind had emptied its home planet like an enema, then turned its rapacious
appetite to the rest of the solar system. The Spanish-owned Saturnian
satellite of Mimas was a supply centre and stop-off point for the thousands of
mining vessels which plundered the smaller planets and the larger moons and