"Smith, E E 'Doc' - SubSpace Vol 2 - Subspace Encounter" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

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.

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
they're both exactly on time."

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
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