"E. E. Doc Smith - Subspace 2 - Subspace Encounter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

Justiciate was the home of a single race. There was little interracial marriage, joining
lives as they put it-not because any race felt itself superior to any other except for the
insufferable red-brown Garshans-but because most ordinary people never left their home
worlds.

All the Justician planets were linked together by hundreds of subspace freight or
passenger lines and by hundreds of thousands of subspace communications channels.
They were also linked together in that they were ruled by, and were more or less willingly
obedient to, a harsh and dictatorial government known as the Council of Grand Justices;
of which His Magnificence Supreme Grand Justice Sonrathendak Ranjak of Slaar was
the unquestioned and unquestionable BOSS.

The planet Slaar was and is the Justiciate's most populous planet; and the city
Meetyl-On-Slaar; the Justiciate's largest city-population ten and a quarter million-was
and is the capital of both the planet and the empire.

To Tellurian eyes Meetyl would have looked very little indeed like a city. It was built on
and inside a rugged, steep-in many places sheerly precipitous-range of mountains; it
extended upward from an ocean's cockily narrow beach to an altitude of well over ten
thousand feet.

If structures built inside and outside of a mountain can be called, respectively, internal
and external buildings, some of Meetyl's external buildings were one story high, some
were a thousand; but all were in harmony with each other and with the awesomely
rugged terrain. There were no streets, all traffic, freight and passenger alike, moved via
air or via tunnel.

In a pressurized section of the ten-thousand-foot level, in a large and sumptuous office
on the glass door of which there was an ornately gold-leafed gladiatorial design and the
words "Sonfay and Baylor-Games," a fat man reclined at an elaborately inlaid piece of
free-form furniture that was his desk. He was a big man, with a fish-belly-pale face and
small, piercing, almost-black eyes. He was three-quarters bald and what hair he had left
was a pepper-and-salt gray.

-6-
Three of the room's walls, its floor, and it-, ceiling, were works of sheerest art in
fine-particled mosaic. Its front wall, one great sheet of water-clear plastic, afforded a
magnificent view of turbulent ocean, of stupendous cliffs, and of cloud flecked, sunny sky.
The man was concerned. however, neither with art nor with nature; he was watching a
young man and a young woman who, arrowing through the air from the north and from
the south, respectively, were climbing fast and would apparently hit his landing stage at
the same time. He glanced at the timepiece on his desk and said aloud to himself, "Good
theyтАЩre both exactly on time.тАЭ

He pushed the button to open the outer valve of his airlock and turned on the "Come in
and shed and stow" sign, the two visitors let themselves in and, without a word, began to
"shed" their flying harnesses and to "stow" them in a closet designed for the purpose.

The male visitor was of medium height and medium build, with the broad and somewhat
sloping shoulders, the narrow waist, and the long-fibered, smoothly flowing muscles of