"Mike Resnick - Tales Of The Galactic Midway 03 - The Wild Alien Tamer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

and the beginning toCitizen Kane , he created aMaltese Falcon in which Sam Spade didn't send the girl over
and aWizard of Oz in which the Munchkins raped both Dorothy and the Wicked Witch of the West.
That got him all the way up to the second world. Then hereally had to go to work.
Since leaving Beta Scuti XI he had replayed the first sixteen Super Bowls and rewritten every Sydney
Greenstreet/Peter Lorre movie he could remember, and was just about to mentally referee a three-way
shootout between Hoot Gibson, Bob Steele, and Clint Eastwood (to even things up a bit, he had decided to
make Eastwood wear a patch over his left eye), when suddenly the robot pilot applied the ship's braking
mechanisms. Half a minute later, as he was painfully picking himself up from the floor, a small sign lit up over
the door of his cabin suggesting that he might find it expedient to connect his safety harness and secure all
loose objects in his general vicinity.
He did as directed, picking up yet another of Tojo's books, belatedly discovered that it contained some pretty
spicy sex scenes he had overlooked, and was avidly reading it when another signтАФ and a very noticeable
bumpтАФ told him that the ship had touched down. He unstrapped himself, turned on his computer, found a
complex readout of the planet's gravity and atmosphere that he didn't understand and a sign saying NO
PROTECTIVE SUIT REQUIRED that he did, walked to the hatch, opened it, and stepped out into the warm,
rather muggy Sabellian air. He breathed in deeply and grimaced; either they had fertilized the field around the
spaceport recently, or he was going to have one hell of a difficult time adjusting to the smell of this place.
He took a shallow breath to see if it made a difference, and was not surprised to find out that it didn't.
Off in the distance he could see a truly impressive mountain range (or else it was a lot closer than he thought
and therefore not so impressive, not that he particularly cared). A river of blue-green water ran placidly along
the outskirts of the spaceport, and he decided that whoever had designed the landing field either didn't worry
too much about contaminating the water or didn't drink it in the first place.
The spaceport itself was unimpressive, as most of them were. He had been raised on science fiction films
and pulp magazines, and had envisionedтАФ as had all the carniesтАФ an unending series of futuristic cities and
wonders spanning the length of the galaxy. In point of fact, he reflected, most of the worlds he had seen
resembled nothing more than the outskirts of Indianapolis.
This current one, and its spaceport, bore an uncanny similarity to Springfield, Missouri.
It was obvious that no passenger ships ever took off or landed here, for while there was a small control tower
he could find nothing remotely resembling a passenger terminal. The landing field itself was perhaps half a
mile in diameter, and currently held only nine small ships, including his own.
There was a beat-up hangar about a quarter of a mile away, just off the edge of the strip, and both the strip
and the hangar looked as if they had seen not just better days but better centuries.
Three hundred yards to his right was a takeoff shaft, which was nothing more than a circle of heat-resistant
webbing strung out over a deep hole which theoretically contained the heat and flames from departing
spaceships. The scars extending for hundreds of feet in all directions implied that the shaft needed to be
deeper, or at least farther away from the stationary ships.
An odd-looking bird with leathery wings and dull-gray plumage flew overhead, croaking hoarsely. He watched
it for a moment, then shrugged and lowered himself to the ground. He had expected his contact to be waiting
for him, but as far as he could tell the field was all but deserted. There were a couple of tan panda-like beings
working on one of the ships, but they paid no attention to him, and finally he began walking across the
landing strip to the hangar, studying the tall grasses surrounding the spaceport and reluctantly concluding
that they didn't look recently fertilized.
He had almost reached the hangar when a door receded and a huge, batlike creature emerged. It had a
foreshortened face, not unlike a bulldog or a boxer, with a pronounced underbite and very visible fangs. Both
its hands and its feet possessed prehensile thumbs, and its wrists and ankles were joined to a very thin flap
of membrane.
Its multifaceted eyes fell on Monk, and it emitted an ominous guttural noise.
тАЬ Back off,тАЭ said Monk, activating his translating device.
The creature twitched its cupped ears and bared its fangs.
тАЬ I ain't looking for no trouble,тАЭ said Monk, backing up a step and flexing his knees in case he had to meet an