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

skipper of the Javelin; Tom is sort of junior engineer, second gunner, and
about third harpooner. We went to school together, which is to say a couple
of years at Professor Hartzenbosch's, learning to read and write and put
figures together. That is all the schooling anybody on Fenris gets, although
Joe Kivelson sent Tom's older sister, Linda, to school on Terra. Anybody
who stays here has to dig out education for himself. Tom and I were still
digging for ours.
Each of us envied the other, when we weren't thinking seriously about
it. I imagined that sea-monster hunting was wonderfully thrilling and
romantic, and Tom had the idea that being a newsman was real hot stuff.
When we actually stopped to think about it, though, we realized that
neither of us would trade jobs and take anything at all for boot. Tom
couldn't string three sentencesтАФno, one sentenceтАФtogether to save his
life, and I'm just a town boy who likes to live in something that isn't
pitching end-for-end every minute.
 Tom is about three inches taller than I am, and about thirty pounds
heavier. Like all monster-hunters, he's trying to grow a beard, though at
present it's just a blond chin-fuzz. I was surprised to see him dressed as I
was, in shorts and sandals and a white shirt and a light jacket. Ordinarily,
even in town, he wears boat-clothes. I looked around behind him, and saw
the brass tip of a scabbard under the jacket. Any time a hunter-ship man
doesn't have his knife on, he isn't wearing anything else. I wondered about
his being in port now. I knew Joe Kivelson wouldn't bring his ship in just to
meet the Peenem├╝nde, with only a couple of hundred hours' hunting left till
the storms and the cold.
тАЬI thought you were down in the South Ocean,тАЭ I said.
тАЬThere's going to be a special meeting of the Co-op,тАЭ he said. тАЬWe only
heard about it last evening,тАЭ by which he meant after 1800 of the previous
Galactic Standard day. He named another hunter-ship captain who had
called the Javelin by screen. тАЬWe screened everybody else we could.тАЭ
That was the way they ran things in the Hunters' Co-operative. Steve
Ravick would wait till everybody had their ships down on the coast of
Hermann Reuch's Land, and then he would call a meeting and pack it with
his stooges and hooligans, and get anything he wanted voted through. I
had always wondered how long the real hunters were going to stand for
that. They'd been standing for it ever since I could remember anything
outside my own playpen, which, of course, hadn't been too long.
I was about to say something to that effect, and then somebody yelled,
тАЬThere she is!тАЭ I took a quick look at the radar bowls to see which way they
were pointed and followed them up to the sky, and caught a tiny twinkle
through a cloud rift. After a moment's mental arithmetic to figure how high
she'd have to be to catch the sunlight, I relaxed. Even with the telephoto,
I'd only get a picture the size of a pinhead, so I fixed the position in my
mind and then looked around at the crowd.
Among them were two men, both well dressed. One was tall and
slender, with small hands and feet; the other was short and stout, with a
scrubby gray-brown mustache. The slender one had a bulge under his left
arm, and the short-and-stout job bulged over the right hip. The former was
Steve Ravick, the boss of the Hunters' Co-operative, and his companion was
the Honorable Morton Hallstock, mayor of Port Sandor and consequently the