"H. Beam Piper - Four- Day Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

There were about two thousand peopleтАФten per cent of the planetary
populationтАФon the wide concrete promenade around the spaceport landing
pit. I came out among them and set down the hamper with my telecast
cameras and recorders, wishing, as usual, that I could find some ten or
twelve-year-old kid weak-minded enough to want to be a reporter when he
grew up, so that I could have an apprentice to help me with my junk.
As the starтАФand onlyтАФreporter of the greatestтАФand onlyтАФpaper on the
planet, I was always on hand when either of the two ships on the
Terra-Odin milk run, the Peenem├╝nde and the Cape Canaveral, landed. Of
course, we always talk to them by screen as soon as they come out of
hyperspace and into radio range, and get the passenger list, and a
speed-recording of any news they are carrying, from the latest native
uprising on Thor to the latest political scandal on Venus. Sometime the
natives of Thor won't be fighting anybody at all, or the Federation Member
Republic of Venus will have some nonscandalous politics, and either will be
the man-bites-dog story to end man-bites-dog stories. All the news is at
least six months old, some more than a year. A spaceship can log a
light-year in sixty-odd hours, but radio waves still crawl along at the same
old 186,000 mps.
I still have to meet the ships. There's always something that has to be
picked up personally, usually an interview with some VIP traveling through.
This time, though, the big story coming in on the Peenem├╝nde was a local
item. Paradox? Dad says there is no such thing. He says a paradox is either
a verbal contradiction, and you get rid of it by restating it correctly, or it's a
structural contradiction, and you just call it an impossibility and let it go at
that. In this case, what was coming in was a real live author, who was
going to write a travel book about Fenris, the planet with the four-day year.
Glenn Murell, which sounded suspiciously like a nom de plume, and nobody
here had ever heard of him.
That was odd, too. One thing we can really be proud of here, besides
the toughness of our citizens, is our public library. When people have to
stay underground most of the time to avoid being fried and/or frozen to
death, they have a lot of time to kill, and reading is one of the cheaper and
more harmless and profitable ways of doing it. And travel books are a
special favorite here. I suppose because everybody is hoping to read about
a worse place than Fenris. I had checked on Glenn Murell at the library.
None of the librarians had ever heard of him, and there wasn't a single
mention of him in any of the big catalogues of publications.
The first and obvious conclusion would be that Mr. Glenn Murell was
some swindler posing as an author. The only objection to that was that I
couldn't quite see why any swindler would come to Fenris, or what he'd
expect to swindle the Fenrisians out of. Of course, he could be on the lam
from somewhere, but in that case why bother with all the cover story?
Some of our better-known citizens came here dodging warrants on other
planets.
I was still wondering about Murell when somebody behind me greeted
me, and I turned around. It was Tom Kivelson.
Tom and I are buddies, when he's in port. He's just a shade older than I
am; he was eighteen around noon, and my eighteenth birthday won't come
till midnight, Fenris Standard Sundial Time. His father is Joe Kivelson, the