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

the hard-trained athlete who specializes in speed and maneuverability rather than in brute
strength. His eyes were a cold gray; his thick, bushy hair was a sun-faded brown, and so
was what little clothing he wore---singlet, shorts, and plastic-soled ground-gripper canvas
shoes. His smooth-shaven face and bare legs and arms and shoulders were deeply
tanned-and were marked and cross-marked with the hair-thin, almost invisible scars of
the expertly-treated wounds of the top-bracket knife fighter. Top bracket'? Definitely.
Only the very best of the best lived long enough in that game to acquire as many scars
as this man bore.

The girl, rid of her flying helmet, shook her head vigorously, so that a mass of brilliant
violet-colored hair, hitherto so tightly confined, swirled about her head. Then, reaching up
with both hands, she fluffed her hair into shape with her fingers. She was almost as tall
as her fellow visitor, was not too many pounds lighter than he in weight. and was
super-superbly built. Her eyes were a gold-flecked hazel. Her clothing, while newer and
more ornamental than the man's, was no more abundant or cumbersome, and-femininity
all solar systems over!-she wore, dangling from a fine platinum chain encircling her left
eat; a two-inch octagonal diffraction grating.

Like the man's, her face and shoulders and arms and legs were deeply tanned; and, like
his, they too were plenteously and finely scarred, if not quite as abundantly as his,
numerously enough to show unmistakably that the worn rawhide haft of the knife at her
belt did not get that way from skinning orksts.

With no change of expression---or rather, with no expression at all on his face-the male
visitor tuned his mind to the girl's and drove a thought. "You're Daught.тАЭ

"Quiet!" she interrupted mentally. Not a muscle of her face moved. Her eyes showed,
strictly unchanged, only the customary interest in a strange young man who was as much

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of a man as this man very evidently was. "Are you sure this fat slob can't yarn? Or
anyone else within range, so you're sure you're not making eaglemeat out of both of us.тАЭ

"Positive," he telepathed. "He's no more psionic than the toad he looks like, and Knuaire
of Spath's on guard. You know him.тАЭ

"Songladen Knuaire? The theoretician? I've met him once, is all. He's an operator. "

"You can carve that on the highest cliff in town.тАЭ

All this, of course, at the transfinite speed of thought, had taken the merest fraction of a
second of time. The fat man was speaking. "Sonrodnar Rodnar of Slaar-Daughtmatja
Marrjyl of Orm--I greet," he said formally, and the two replied in unison, "Sonfayand
Baylor of Slaar, I greet.тАЭ

"You two haven't met, I understand," the games-master said, and went on to introduce
his two visitors to each other, using the informal mode. "Rodnar, Status Thirty-Eight . . ."
-the person of higher status was always named first.. and Marrjyl, Status Forty, meet
each other.тАЭ