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

trip. What he found was impressive, to be sure, and there was no question that they were dangerous and
carnivorous.
They were also some twenty-five feet at the shoulder, fifty tons in weight, and so incredibly simpleminded as
to be totally untrainable. Not that their intelligence mattered all that much; they were also too big to fit into his
ship and too expensive to feed, which negated all further considerations.
The second world he had visited, Gamma Delta V, had provided the most interesting animals: amoeba-like
blobs of protoplasm that could be trained to form themselves into artistic and fascinating shapes. He spent a
few days working with them before concludingтАФ reluctantly, because they were very pleasant and quite
amenable to trainingтАФ that while they might have enhanced an art gallery, they just weren't a viable act for a
carnival.
He found pretty much what he wanted on Dorillion, the third world he visited. They had four different catlike
species of carnivore, ranging from a silver animal barely smaller than a leopard to a huge mottled creature
almost twice the size of a lion. They were reasonably intelligent and reasonably trainableтАФ and unreasonably
expensive. He radioed Flint and laid out the situation for himтАФ two million credits per animalтАФ and wasn't
surprised that Flint felt the prices were outrageous.
He never found out what kind of animals there were on Quantos VIII.
Long before he got there he was informed that because of a worldwide plague that had affected their meat
animals,all their other animals were now being used as food.
The fifth world on his agenda was Voorhite XIV. He didn't land there either, once he found out that it
possessed a chlorine atmosphere and that its animals would perish upon contact with oxygen.
Beta Scuti XI was the sixth of the ten worlds Mr. Ahasuerus had programmed into the ship's navigational
computer, and as he took off from it on the long journey to Sabellius III he found himself seriously wondering if
he wouldever find replacements for Bruno and Simba and the leopards.
Monk had never liked being confined in close quarters, and his added worries about the act served only to
make him more uncomfortable than usual during this leg of the voyage.
After spending a few hours trying to concentrate on some books he had borrowed from TojoтАФ he had taken
twenty-seven volumes and hadn't made it to page 30 of any of themтАФ he let himself into the cargo hold for
what had become his daily calisthenic session. It had taken him perhaps ten seconds during his first day in
space to realize that he didn'tknow any calisthenics, and he had created a regimen based on his
remembrances of the warming-up exercises he had seen during pro football pre-game shows on Sunday
afternoons. Then one day he had turned off the gravity controls and practiced тАЬ swimmingтАЭ through the air; it
hadn't worked quite the way he had anticipated, but he had kept in some semblance of physical shape by
pushing off from one wall to the next, not unlike a giant bullfrog. At first, his sessions lasted only fifteen
minutesтАФ after all, forty-three-year-old animal tamers didn't use the same muscles as defensive linemen or
bullfrogsтАФ but he had gradually worked up to an hour at a time, two periods a day. This, added to sixty
minutes of bored browsing through the books and eight hours of sleep, left him thirteen hours a day in which
to fight the overwhelming boredom of solitary spaceflight. He fondly remembered PacMan and Asteroids from
the local arcades in Vermont and tried to jury-rig his cabin's computer for some simple games; the only result
was that the hot water in his bathroom no longer worked and the temperature in his compartment fell six
degrees.
So he had long conversations with the robot pilot (which, having no voice, never disagreed with him) and sang
bawdy ballads at the top of his lungs and made up new anecdotes to go along with the thousands he could
dredge up from his colorful past at a moment's notice. He created two all-time all-star baseball teams, one
managed by John McGraw and the other by Casey Stengel, and from his imaginary announcer's booth called
every pitch of a seven-game World Series. He created a twelve-horse field with every fabulous thoroughbred
from Man oтАЩ War and Equipoise to Ruffian and Seattle Slew, and had them race at every distance from six
furlongs to two miles, then did it again on muddy tracks, and finally started having his winners carry
increasingly higher weights during the rematches. He envisioned every play of a tennis match between Bill
Tilden and John McEnroe, and then, because he was still bored and didn't like McEnroe very much anyway,
had them play again after inflicting McEnroe with hemorrhoids. He verbally rewrote the ending toCasablanca