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

planetary government of Fenris.
They had held their respective positions for as long as I could remember
anything at all. I could never remember an election in Port Sandor, or an
election of officers in the Co-op. Ravick had a bunch of goons and
triggermenтАФI could see a couple of them loitering in the backgroundтАФwho
kept down opposition for him. So did Hallstock, only his wore badges and
called themselves police.
Once in a while, Dad would write a blistering editorial about one or the
other or both of them. Whenever he did, I would put my gun on, and so
would Julio Kubanoff, the one-legged compositor who is the third member
of the Times staff, and we would take turns making sure nobody got behind
Dad's back. Nothing ever happened, though, and that always rather hurt
me. Those two racketeers were in so tight they didn't need to care what the
Times printed or 'cast about them.
Hallstock glanced over in my direction and said something to Ravick.
Ravick gave a sneering laugh, and then he crushed out the cigarette he was
smoking on the palm of his left hand. That was a regular trick of his.
Showing how tough he was. Dad says that when you see somebody
showing off, ask yourself whether he's trying to impress other people, or
himself. I wondered which was the case with Steve Ravick.
Then I looked up again. The Peenem├╝nde was coming down as fast as
she could without over-heating from atmosphere friction. She was almost
buckshot size to the naked eye, and a couple of tugs were getting ready to
go up and meet her. I got the telephoto camera out of the hamper, checked
it, and aimed it. It has a shoulder stock and handgrips and a trigger like a
submachine gun. I caught the ship in the finder and squeezed the trigger
for a couple of seconds. It would be about five minutes till the tugs got to
her and anything else happened, so I put down the camera and looked
around.
Coming through the crowd, walking as though the concrete under him
was pitching and rolling like a ship's deck on contragravity in a storm, was
Bish Ware. He caught sight of us, waved, overbalanced himself and
recovered, and then changed course to starboard and bore down on us. He
was carrying about his usual cargo, and as usual the manifest would read,
Baldur honey-rum, from Harry Wong's bar.
Bish wasn't his real name. Neither, I suspected, was Ware. When he'd
first landed on Fenris, some five years ago, somebody had nicknamed him
the Bishop, and before long that had gotten cut to one syllable. He looked
like a bishop, or at least like what anybody who's never seen a bishop
outside a screen-play would think a bishop looked like. He was a big man,
not fat, but tall and portly; he had a ruddy face that always wore an
expression of benevolent wisdom, and the more cargo he took on the wiser
and more benevolent he looked.
 He had iron-gray hair, but he wasn't old. You could tell that by the
backs of his hands; they weren't wrinkled or crepy and the veins didn't
protrude. And drunk or soberтАФthough I never remembered seeing him in the
latter conditionтАФhe had the fastest reflexes of anybody I knew. I saw him,
once, standing at the bar in Harry Wong's, knock over an open bottle with
his left elbow. He spun half around, grabbed it by the neck and set it up, all
in one motion, without spilling a drop, and he went on talking as though