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

"For how long?" the Lady Berenice asked wearily.
"For tonight only. He is leaving Wine-Woman-and-Song in the morning."
 "Very well."
The house-mother withdrew, and after a mo-ment the Lady Berenice heard the lift door sigh closed.
She sat down to wait, wondering if she would hate this one as much as she had hated all the others, if she
would hate herself tomorrow as much as she had hated herself on all the other tomorrows.
Presently, she heard the lift door sigh open, and then footsteps in the corridor. The knockтАФ
She got up and opened the door. The Plenipotentiary from New Jericho was in his late nineties,
touped, and refurbished to pass for a man of fifty. He was a far cry from the Emperor of the Universe.
The Lady Berenice repressed a shudder. "Come in," she said.

New Tokyo was off the beaten path of the regular runs, but his new job with Falcon Lines took him
to many of the out of the way places. He walked through the narrow streets of Kakuen, past the tile
facades of the enchanting houses, past the foyers where the mama sans sat, wearing their timeless smiles.
Pretty kimonoed girls leaned out over low balconies, laughing down with starlight in their hair.
He remembered a passage he had read a long time ago, when he was a cabin boy on the Perseus,
and he welcomed the words into his mind, let them flow softly through his thoughtsтАФ
I am lonely with the loneli-ness that comes to all men in womanless ships, whether they be
ships at sea or ships in space; and if there be no woman to greet me when my ship reaches
continent or planet, then I shall be lonely beyond all loneliness, beyond all capacity to endure ...
A girl standing on the balcony just above caught his eye, perhaps because of the way the starlight
touched her face, perhaps because of her wistful smile. He paused in the street, in the cool night, looking
up at her. Her hair was black, and deftly piled to an elaborate coiffeur. Her eyebrows made him think of
birds in flight. She touched her breast. "Hisako," she said softly, and he went back to the foyer he had
just passed and told the mama san whom he wanted.

She could tell by the coldness of her cheeks that her face had gone white, and she could tell by the
look in the examiner's eyes that it would be futile to protest his indictment, that no matter what she said,
Gomorrah was going to be her next;тАФand lastтАФ port of call.
But the charge was so mon-strous, so untrue, that she had to dispute it. "You must be mistaken," she
said. "I can't possibly beтАФbe that way!"
"Who is your lover?" the examiner asked coldly.
"But I have no lover. I'm trying to tell you that. I've always used my field!"
The examiner shrugged. "Be a fool and protect him then, if you want to. I should think, though, that
you'd want to expose him, that you'd want him to share the respon-sibility."
"But I'm not protecting him. There simply isn't any such person. You must be mistaken, or else my
field is defective."
"I've been in this business a long time," the examiner said. "I don't make mistakes. And I've never
heard of a defective field." He opened the door. "Book passage to Gomorrah for the Lady Berenice and
confiscate her C-field," he told his assistant. "And put her in custody till her ship leaves."
"Passage for one?"
The examiner looked at the Lady Berenice. "Well?"
She returned his gaze de-fiantly. "One," she said.
The evangelist had set up his portable pulpit just outside the spaceport, and Cross wandered over to
the fringe of the crowd to listen. The Pandora didn't have clearance till tomorrow, and his passen-ger
wouldn't be coming on board till shortly before blast-off. In a way, he was glad of that. He had always
felt guilty about escorting fallen ladies of the stars to Gomorrah, and this time it would be worse, for, on
his last stop there, he had visited the settlement be-yond the mountains and seen the monsters . . .

The evangelist was an ema-ciated young man with dark, tortured eyes. As he talked, he waved his