"Robert F. Young - Passage to Gomorrah" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

everyone on board, and the resultant particles, both inanimate and ani-mate, would be scattered
irretrievably throughout the space-time continuum. Suddenly he remembered his passenger,
remembered her apprehension about time storms. He hurried toward her cabin, telling himself that it was
his responsibility to be with her during the danger period, that it was his duty to protect her; and all the
while he told himself, he knew that he was lying in his teeth, that there was no dangerтАФonly the
embarrassment of having to share one's most intimate experiences with anotherтАФand that his presence
was totally uncalled for.

She opened the door at his knock. One look into her eyes told him that she had been expecting him;
one glance at her magnificent body, bereft, now, even of a towel, told him that he had to have her, no
matter what the cost.
She drew him into the room and closed the door, and suddenly he knew that this was no ordinary
business transaction, that she wanted him as desperately, almost, as he wanted her. He tried to
understand, and a glimmering of the truth touched him; then he felt the warmth of her flesh, and then the
moistness of her mouth on his, and he seemed to melt, to dissolve, even as the room dissolved around
him тАФ the room and the ship and the present. . . .

"Before approving your ap-plication, I'm required to brief you," the male inter-viewer for Camellias,
Inc., said. "We don't want any of our future ladies of the stars to look back some day and ac-cuse us of
coercing her into Camellia-activity ... Do you know anything about the pro-fession at all?"
"A little," Berenice said, nervously.
"A very little, I suspect. . . First of all, you must erase from your mind whatever det-rimental
associations you may have with your future calling. The ancient attitude towards prostitution still prevails
on Earth, and probably will con-tinue to prevail for centuries to come; but in space, even a common
house-worker is a re-spected individual, while a full-fledged lady of the stars is the equivalent of a
princess or a president's daughter. The 'World's Oldest Profession' has become the 'Galaxy's Noblest
Profession'.
"Cosmic radiation, undistilled by the Earth's atmosphere is quite a different proposition from the
distilled radiation which has bombard-ed mankind since birth. Prolonged exposure to it causes certain
genic changes in both male and female chromo-somes. Interplanetary travel, thanks to A Priori,
occasion-ed only relatively brief pe-riods of exposure; but inter-stellar travel is something else. Even with
A Priori, the journeys between the stars sometimes require weeks, even months. As a result, no woman
can ever enter inter-stellar space without first for-feiting her function as a womanтАФunless she wants to
give birth to a mutant, or, to call a spade a spade, a mon-ster.
"You are probably familiar with the Earth Council's fa-mous Dual Decision of two generations ago:
the decision to confine all interstellar per-sonnel, during their sojourn on Earth, to the port areas; and the
decision to set aside Polaris 2 as a haven for the monsters that had already been born and for those that
might yet be born. But, how-ever commendable it might have been in other respects, the Dual Decision
evaded the most vital aspect of the prob-lemтАФthe need of men in space for the women they could no
longer have.
"There was only one solu-tion, and it was obvious from the first. But it was a solution which a
sex-conscious, sex-ridden, sex-frightened, sex-bewildered people, whose var-ious religous credos
classified sex, per se, as a sin, could not acceptтАФexcept by degrees.
"The first free lance ladies of the stars were of French. Swedish and Japanese descent. They were
followed by most of the other racial strains. Eventually their num-bers increased to a point where the
Earth Council could no longer ignore their activities and was forced either to combat the star-wide
spread of the profession, or to legal-ize it and to encourage it to function along with the time-honored
lines of private en-terprise. Legalization was in-evitable, but still, had it not been for the lobbyists, it might
have been irreparably delayed. I am proud to say that the founder of Camellias, Inc., was one of the
most articulate and influential of those lobbyists, and it was probably due more to his efforts than to the