"(Brian Aldiss)-Outside" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

"Poker," Jagger said.
"Canasta."
"Gin rummy."
"We'll play later," Calvin said. "It'll pass the time in the evening.
" The cards would be a challenge to them; they would have to sit together
to play, round a table, facing each other.
Nothing was in operation to separate them, but there seemed no strong
force to keep them together, once the tiny business of opening the store
was over. Jagger worked the vacuum cleanser down the hall, past the front
door that did not open, and rode it up the stairs to clean the upper
landings; not that the place was dirty, but cleaning was something you did
anyway in the morning. The women sat with Pief desultorily discussing how
to manage the rationing, but after that they lost contact with each other
and drifted away on their own. Calvin and Harley had already strolled off
in different directions.
The house was a rambling affair. It had few windows, and such as
there were did not open, were unbreakable and admitted no light. Darkness
lay everywhere; illumination from an invisible source followed one's entry
into a room - but the black had to be entered before it faded. Every room
was furnished, but with odd pieces that bore little relation to each
other, as if there was no purpose for the room. Rooms equipped for
purposeless beings have that air about them.
No plan was discernable on first or second floor or in the long empty
attics. Only familiarity could reduce the maze-like quality of room and
corridor. At least there was ample time for familiarity.
Harley spent a long while walking about, hands in pockets. At one
point he met Dapple: she was drooping gracefully over a sketchbook,
amateurishly copying a picture that hung on one of the walls - a picture
fo the room in which she sat. They exchanged a few words, then Harley
moved on.
Something lurked in the edge of his mind like a spider in the corner
of its web. He stepped into what they called the piano room and then he
realized what was worrying him. Almost furtively, he glanced round as the
darkness slipped away, and then he looked at the big piano. Some strange
things had arrived on the shelf from time to time and had been distributed
over the house: one of them stood on the top of the piano now.
It was a model, heavy and about two feet high, squat, almost round,
with a sharp nose and four buttressed vanes. Harley knew what it was. It
was a ground-to-space ship, a model of the burly ferries that lumbered up
to the spaceship proper.
That had caused them more unsettlement than when the piano itself had
appeared in the store. Keeping his eyes on the model, Harley seated
himself at the piano stool and sat tensely, trying to draw something from
the rear of his mind ... something connected with spaceships.
Whatever it was, it was unpleasant, and it dodged backwards whenever
he thought he had laid a mental finger on it. So it always eluded him. If
only he could discuss it with someone, it might be teased out of its
hiding place. Unpleasant: menacing, yet with a promise entangled in the
menace.
If he could get at it, meet it boldly face to face, he could do ...