"Robert F. Young - The First Sweet Sleep of Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Young Robert F)

"Iced tea, Dr. Clarke?"
Startled, Millicent looked up. "OhтАФOh, thank you, Dr. Hanley. I was just catching up on my notes."
She accepted the tall frosted glass and set it on the arm of the tent chair.
"Gloria; made it," Dr. Hanley said. "She and Vestor and I are going to play a few games of Martian
canasta in the mess tent. Care to join us?"
"Oh, no," Millicent said. "I really have to finish this entry."
He looked at her quizzically, his gray eyes laughing and yet not laughing at all. It was an unanalytical
mannerism that had made her dislike him all through college and all during their field work together. He
must have sensed her annoyance.
"Okay, I only asked," he said. "By the way, you know it's Saturday afternoon, don't you?"
He turned and walked away.

Primarily such a postulation gives us our first clear insight into the predominant paradox of
the present cultureтАФthe outstanding dearth of males. While it fails to resolve the problem of what
physical cause lies behind this dearth, it eliminates the paradoxical element of the result, for what
could be more logical than that the females of a pure susu should overwhelmingly outnumber the
males of a pure susu?
Such a postulation does not, unfortunately, explain the cyclic age groups of both females and
males, but it does provide us with a sound foundation upon which to erect the structure of our
culture study тАж

Saturday afternoonтАФ
It was so silly to compute non-Terran time by the Terran calendar, Millicent thought. Particularly
when you were on a planet whose orbital velocity was so insignificant that its year equalled almost twenty
of Terra's. She laid her notebook on her lap and picked up the glass of iced tea.
Saturday afternoonтАФ
At her feet the hill on which the subsidiary camp stood dropped gently down to the shore of the blue
cove. The native village sprawled lazily on the white sand, and native fishing boats speckled the placid
water like basking water spiders. Beyond the cove, the Sapphire Sea spread out in sparkling wastes to
the low-lying Flower Islands.
She sipped the iced tea slowly, letting its flavor linger in her mouth. Her mind skipped back a dozen
years to the patio of her father's summer home, and she saw her father sitting by the rose trellis with his
eternal volume of Shelley, and she saw herself, a little girl sitting in a sequestered corner with her books
...
The memory should have been pleasant, but it was rather horrible instead. Millicent set the glass on
the ground and stood up. She decided to let her notes go till evening; somehow she didn't feel like writing
any more.
Laughter and the tinkle of ice cubes came from the nearby mess tent. For a moment she considered
joining the three players, then she thought of Gloria Mitchell. Gloria Mitchell was the group's secretary;
she was blonde and chic and read confession comics. She was just about the last person in the world you
would have expected staid anthropologists like Dr. Vestor and Dr. Hanley to choose for a secretary.
Suddenly Millicent hated the camp. She felt as though she couldn't endure it for another second.
After returning her journal to her tent, she started walking back into the hills.
She climbed her favorite hill and sat down beneath her favorite tree and gazed out over the Sapphire
Sea to the Flower Islands. The pounding of the waves against the jagged feet of the cliffs came softly to
her ears.
She forced her wandering thoughts into anthropological channels, concentrating on the native village
on the shore of the cove. There were hundreds of similar villages, all of them matriarchies, scattered along
the northern littoral, but one was enough for her purposes.
She thought of the incredibly beautiful people she had seen, and wondered for the thousandth time