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

nothing had happened. He was quoting Homer, I remembered, and you
could tell that he was thinking in the original ancient Greek and translating
to Lingua Terra as he went.
He was always dressed as he was now, in a conservative black suit, the
jacket a trifle longer than usual, and a black neckcloth with an Uller
organic-opal pin. He didn't work at anything, but quarterlyтАФonce every
planetary dayтАФa draft on the Banking Cartel would come in for him, and
he'd deposit it with the Port Sandor Fidelity & Trust. If anybody was
unmannerly enough to ask him about it, he always said he had a rich uncle
on Terra.
When I was a kidтАФwell, more of a kid than I am nowтАФI used to believe
he really was a bishopтАФunfrocked, of course, or ungaitered, or whatever
they call it when they give a bishop the heave-ho. A lot of people who
weren't kids still believed that, and they blamed him on every denomination
from Anglicans to Zen Buddhists, not even missing the Satanists, and there
were all sorts of theories about what he'd done to get excommunicated, the
mildest of which was that somewhere there was a cathedral standing
unfinished because he'd hypered out with the building fund. It was
generally agreed that his ecclesiastical organization was paying him to stay
out there in the boondocks where he wouldn't cause them further
embarrassment.
I was pretty sure, myself, that he was being paid by somebody,
probably his family, to stay out of sight. The colonial planets are full of
that sort of remittance men.
Bish and I were pretty good friends. There were certain old ladies, of
both sexes and all ages, of whom Professor Hartzenbosch was an example,
who took Dad to task occasionally for letting me associate with him. Dad
simply ignored them. As long as I was going to be a reporter, I'd have to
have news sources, and Bish was a dandy. He knew all the disreputable
characters in town, which saved me having to associate with all of them,
and it is sad but true that you get very few news stories in Sunday school.
Far from fearing that Bish would be a bad influence on me, he rather hoped
I'd be a good one on Bish.
I had that in mind, too, if I could think of any way of managing it. Bish
had been a good man, once. He still was, except for one thing. You could
tell that before he'd started drinking, he'd really been somebody,
somewhere. Then something pretty bad must have happened to him, and
now he was here on Fenris, trying to hide from it behind a bottle.
Something ought to be done to give him a shove up on his feet again. I
hate waste, and a man of the sort he must have been turning himself into
the rumpot he was now was waste of the worst kind.
It would take a lot of doing, though, and careful tactical planning.
Preaching at him would be worse than useless, and so would simply trying
to get him to stop drinking. That would be what Doc Rojansky, at the
hospital, would call treating the symptoms. The thing to do was make him
want to stop drinking, and I didn't know how I was going to manage that.
I'd thought, a couple of times, of getting him to work on the Times, but we
barely made enough money out of it for ourselves, and with his remittance
he didn't need to work. I had a lot of other ideas, now and then, but every
time I took a second look at one, it got sick and died.