"Eric Frank Russel - The Great Explosion" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

dared ignore. Blieder put an end to all that.

Ships rapidly gained a tremendous boost in size and carrying capacity. Planners
and builders made it a point of honor that each new vessel must be larger than any
of its predecessors. The result was the construction of a succession of monsters
graduated nearer and nearer to the popular idea of the super-colossal.

The ship now taking a load aboard for its maiden flight from Terra was the very
latest and therefore the largest. Its enormous shell of chrome-titanium alloy was
eight hundred feet in diameter, one and a half miles in length. Mass like that takes
up room and makes a dent. The great under-belly rested in a rut twelve feet deep.

News-channel commentators, lost for suitable superlatives, had repeatedly
described the vessel as "one to make the senses boggle." Always willing to do
some fervent boggling, the public had turned up in its thousands. A solid mass of

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people stood behind the barriers and studied the ship with the bovine stares of
good, obedient, uncomplaining taxpayers. It did not occur to any of them that
somebody had paid for this gigantic vision or that they had been stung good and
hard in their individual and collective wallets.

People were momentarily incapable of deep thoughts about cost. The flag had
been raised, the bands were playing and this was a patriotic occasion. It is
conventional that one does not think vulgar thoughts of money on a patriotic
occasion; the individual who chooses such a time to count his cash is by definition
a traitor or a no-good bum.

So the ship lay there while the tribal totem fluttered in the breeze and the bands
produced tribal noises and a careful selection of tribal braves filed aboard. Those
mounting the gangways numbered more than two thousands. They were divisible
into three distinct types. The tall, lean, crinkly-eyed ones were the crew. The crop-
haired, heavy-jowled ones were the troops. The expressionless, balding and
myopic ones were the bureaucrats.

The first of these types bore themselves with the professional casualness of people
to whom a journey is just another trip in a lifetime of meanderings. Lugging loads
of kit up the gangways, the troops showed the tough resignation of those who
have delivered themselves into the hands of loudmouthed idiots one of whom
stood at the base of the steps and bellowed abuse at every fifth man. The
bureaucrats wore the pained expressions of those suffering something that
shouldn't be done to a dog. They had been dragged from their desks and that is the
Last Straw.

An hour after the last man, box, case and package had been loaded the V.I.P.
arrived. This was the Imperial Ambassador, a florid-faced character with small
eyes and a huge belly. Mounting the rostrum he gazed importantly at the