"Mike Resnick - Hunting The Snark" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

At that time I worked for Silinger & Mahr, the oldest and best-known firm in the
safari business. True, Silinger died 63 years ago and Mahr followed him six
years later and now it's run by a faceless corporation back on Deluros VIII, but
they had better luck with their name than I had with mine, so they never changed
it.

We were the most expensive company in the business, but we were worth it.
Hundreds of worlds have been hunted out over the millennia, but people with
money will always pay to have first crack at territory no one else has set foot
on or even seen. A couple of years ago the company purchased a ten-planet
hunting concession in the newly-opened Albion Cluster, and so many of our
clients wanted to be the first to hunt virgin worlds that we actually held
drawings to see who'd get the privilege. Silinger & Mahr agreed to supply one
professional hunter per world and allow a maximum of four clients per party, and
the fee was (get ready for it!) twenty million credits. Or eight million Maria
Theresa dollars, if you don't have much faith in the credit -- and out here on
the Frontier, not a lot of people do.

We pros wanted to hunt new worlds every bit as much as the clients did. They
were parceled out by seniority, and as seventh in line, I was assigned Dodgson
IV, named after the woman who'd first charted it a dozen years ago. Nine of us
had full parties. The tenth had a party of one -- an incredibly wealthy man who
wasn't into sharing.

Now, understand: I didn't take out the safari on my own. I was in charge, of
course, but I had a crew of twelve blue-skinned humanoid Dabihs from Kakkab
Kastu IV. Four were gunbearers for the clients. (I didn't have one myself; I
never trusted anyone else with my weapons.) To continue: one was the cook, three
were skinners (and it takes a lot more skill than you think to skin an alien
animal you've never seen before without spoiling the pelt), and three were camp
attendants. The twelfth was my regular tracker, whose name -- Chajinka --
always sounded like a sneeze.

We didn't really need a pilot -- after all, the ship's navigational computer
could start from half a galaxy away and land on top of a New Kenya shilling --
but our clients were paying for luxury, and Silinger & Mahr made sure they got
it. So in addition to the Dabihs, we also had our own personal pilot, Captain
Kosha Mbele, who'd spent two decades flying one-man fighter ships in the war
against the Sett.

The hunting party itself consisted of four business associates, all wealthy
beyond my wildest dreams if not their own. There was Willard Marx, a real
estate magnate who'd developed the entire Roosevelt planetary system; Jaxon
Pollard, who owned a matching chains of cut-rate supermarkets and upscale
bakeries that did business on more than a thousand worlds; Philemon Desmond, the
CEO of Far London's largest bank -- with branches in maybe 200 systems -- and
his wife, Ramona, a justice on that planet's Supreme Court.

I don't know how the four of them met, but evidently they'd all come from the
same home world and had known each other for a long time. They began pooling