"Scott Westerfield - Unsportzmanlike Conduct" - читать интересную книгу автора (Westerfeld Scott)

Unsportsmanlike Conduct
by Scott Westerfeld

There's a lot you can fit into a 851-gram teleport.
Lean beef is about two-thirds water, so more than two-and-a-half kilos of ground chuc
can be reconstituted from a transport that size. Enough for twenty-nine decent hamburgers, o
for every human being on the planet. For fixings we had lettuce and plenty of soybread, and
tomatoes were bigger than golf balls that second year on Tau.
Alternatively, each member of the colony could have received a seven-page letter. No
text or camfeeds, but actual pieces of paper touched by our loved ones, marked with tactile
incisions of the pen. (And try spraying perfume on a textfile.)
With 851 grams of hops pellets, we could have produced about 2,000 liters of homebr
We had our own sugar and malt, but they'd never given us seed crop for hops, to make sure
couldn't drink more beer than Houston decreed.
Or, for a truly exotic experience, three medium-sized oranges would have massed abou
the same. Not dehydrated, pre-juiced, or even peeled. Just the real things smelling of an ear
summer's hard sunlight. We had a tiny anti-scurvy orchard, of course. But our starship had
brought only fast-growing limes, our oldest trees four feet tall and delivering a small, bitter
fruit.
None of these items were in the transport, however. We had voted. With one annoyed
abstention, the choice had been made.
The tube glowed, scattering its weird light through the shed. The familiar room turned
eerie around us, bent like the colors of an Oklahoma landscape just before a tornado folds i
shape overhead. Seven light-years away in the packed suburbs of Houston, lights dimmed a
air-conditioning faltered as a grid serving fourteen million was poached. This torrent of po
crowded its way into some unthinkably long and narrow channel of the quantum that led to
851 grams of matter riding the wave.
When the tube light faded, we all stood blinking.
I popped the clean-seal, which hissed at me as vacuum equalized, but waited a momen
before opening it. My instincts insisted that the transport would still be hot to the touch insi
however ridiculous that notion was. And worse, if the squirt had blown, we'd all wasted
weeks of mass allowance on a pile of splinters.
But the transport had come in clean. I lifted it up for Alex and Yoshi to admire.
"Beautiful," Yoshi said.
 "Much better than my old one." Alex was right. The thirty-ounce Louisville Slugger fel
much sweeter than our broken bat. The long, wide grain of the wood showed the considera
age of the ash tree from which it had been hewn. The finish lent it an emerald gleam in the
antiseptic lights of the clean shed, and it hefted like a feather in my hand.
Of course, our pals back on Earth wouldn't have sent us anything but the best. The pric
a solid-gold bat wouldn't approach the energy costs of a 851-gram transport.
Still, this Slugger was a beauty.
Yoshi took it gingerly from my hands, a look of relief on his face. It had been his wild
swing that had cracked the first one two weeks before, reducing it to the two most expensiv
pieces of firewood in human history, leaving us without the game.
Alex patted him on the shoulder, all forgiven now. The old bat, nine gloves, and six
baseballs had comprised her entire personal mass allowance on the starship out, and had
proven the most popular contribution to the public good. (With the possible exception of Ia
Claymore's micro-still.)
Alex took the bat from Yoshi, stepped back, and took a practice swing. She grinned lik
kid on her birthday.