"Robert F. Young - Prisoners of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

Beautiful Karen, who had fled the shackles of Earth, once had written: "We shall
never leave Earth as long as we compute escape velocity in miles per hour . . ."


PRISONERS OF EARTH
BY ROBERT F. YOUNG

Guildenstern: Prison, my lord?
Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark
being one o' the worst.
Rosencrantz: We think not so, my lord.
Hamlet: Why, then, tтАЩis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so. To me it is a prison.
(HAMLET : Act II, Scene 2)

IT T WAS a country of blue lakesтАФthe Misseros d'n Gaedo region of Altair 12. There were little
lakes and big lakes and middle-sized lakes scattered like sapphire dewdrops over a tableland verdant
with forest. Some of the lakes had small green islands in them and it was on one of these islands that
Larry saw the second native village.
He brought the little flier down, circling several times before he deposited it gently on the water. Then
he retracted the swallow-wings and started taxiing toward the shore. He had a feeling that this, surely,
was the right place.
It had the right lookтАФthe odd, pathetic aspect all the other places had had in one way or another.
The pink, spherical houses, perched absurdly on gangling stilts, came right down to the water's edge,
and the village street debouched on the beach. If you could call the meandering aisle between the houses
a street. In any event it sufficed for one, and it was filled now with the people of the village.



They came down to the lake to greet him. The quaint people, the grown-up little boy and girl people
who, in the premeditated phraseology of the Altair travelogue, "played at being adults in their simple
paradise of fish and fruits and little isosceles triangles of vegetable gardens."
Larry eased the flier between two cluttered fishing rafts, running its prow into the soft beach sand. He
locked the controls and climbed out. The village chief walked down to the water's edge to receive him.
"Welcome to my country," the chief said in standard Galactia. He bowed ceremoniously. In the eyes
of his people he was far from young, but in Larry's eyes he was a little boy with a fat man's body. He had
a large cherubic faceтАФa small pink mouth, chubby beardless cheeks, and enormous blue eyes. His hair
was light brown, and there was a startling cowlick protruding over his forehead like the visor of a
baseball cap. He was clad, as were all his subjects, in a gaudy thigh-length skirt, and he wore a fresh lei
of iliao flowers around his neck.
Larry imitated the bow, feeling ludicrous. "Thank you," he said. He surveyed the crowded street,
looking over the chief's shoulder. But all he saw were baby faces and rotund bodies, and no familiar face
with delicate features and haunted blue eyes, no graceful shoulders. But that didn't necessarily prove that
this was the wrong village. Karen didn't care for crowds, not even crowds that gathered to welcome her
own husband. If he knew her at all she had probably fled into the forest the moment she had seen the
approaching flier and now was sitting by some quiet stream, composing introvert verse. . . .
The chief had begun his well-rehearsed welcome speech. "тАФfor the duration of your visit," he was
saying, "let my country be your country. Let my subjects be your subjects, and I, the chief, shall be your