"Pohl, Frederik - The High Test" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pohl Frederick)

Evanston Aguilars? In the recombinant foodstuff business? They're really rich, I
guess. This one had her own speedster, and she was really sulked that she
couldn't drive it on an Earth license. See, they have this suppressor field; as
soon as any vehicle comes into the system, zap, it's off, and it just floats
until some licensed pilot comes out to fly it in. So I took her up, and right
away she started giving me ablation: "Not so much takeoff boost! You'll burn out
the tubes! and "Don't ride the reverter in hyperdrive! and "Get out of low
orbit- you want to rack us up?
Well, I can take just so much of that. An instructor is almost like the captain
of a ship, you know. He's the boss! So I explained to her that my name wasn't
"Chowderhead or "Dullwit! but James Paul Madigan, and it was the instructors who
were supposed to yell at the students, not the other way around. Well, it was
her own speedster, and a really neat one at that. Maybe I couldn't blame her for
being nervous about somebody else driving it. So I decided to give her a real
easy lesson. Practicing parking orbits-if you can't do that, you don't deserve a
license! And she was really rotten at it. It looks easy, but there's an art to
cutting the hyperdrive with just the right residual velocity, so that you slide
right into your assigned coordinates. The more she tried, the farther off she
got. Finally she demanded that I take her back to the spaceport. She said I was
making her nervous. She said she'd get a different instructor for tomorrow or
she'd just move on to some other system where they didn't have benefacted
chimpanzees giving driving lessons.
I just let her rave. Then the next student I had was a Fomalhautian. You know
that species, they've got two heads and scales and forked tails, and they're
always making a nuisance of themselves in the United Systems? If you believe
what they say on the vidcom, they're bad news-in fact, the reason Cassiopeia
installed the suppressor field was because they had a suspicion the
Fomalhautians were thinking about invading and taking over 43-G. But this one
was nice as pie! Followed every instruction. Never gave me any argument.
Apologized when he made a mistake and got us too close to one of the mini- black
holes near the primary. He said that was because he was unfamiliar with the
school ship, and said he'd prefer to use his own space yacht for the next
lesson. He made the whole day better, after that silly, spoiled rich brat!
I was glad to have a little cheering up, to tell you the truth. I was feeling a
little lonesome and depressed. Probably it's because it's so close to the
holidays. It's hard to believe that back in Chicago it's only three days until
Christmas, and all the store windows will he full of holodecorations and
there'll be that big tree in Grant Park and I bet it's snowing. . . and here on
Cassiopeia 43-G it's sort of like a steam bath with interludes of Niagara Falls.

I do wish you a merry Christmas, Mom! Hope my gifts got there all right.
Love,
Jim Paul
2213 12 2~ LATE
Dear Mom:
Well, Christmas Day is just about over. Not that it's any different from any
other day here on 43-G, where the human colonists were mostly Buddhist or Moslem
and the others were-well! You've seen the types that hang around the United
Systems building in Palatine-smelled them, too, right? Especially those
Arcturans. I don't know whether those people have any religious holidays or not,