"01 - Midnight at the Well of Souls" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chalker Jack L)

in Skander's voice. "ProgrammedЧplanned degenera-
tion! It's an interesting theory, Citizen Varnett. Per-
haps we'll find out in time."

He motioned and they entered a building with a
strange, hexagonal doorway. All the doors were hexa-
gons, it appeared. The interior of the room was very
large, but there was no sign as to its purpose or func-


tion. It looked like an apartment or a store after the
tenants had moved out, taking everything with them.

"The room," Skander pointed out to them, "is hex-
agonalЧas the city is hexagonal, as is almost everything
in it if you see it from the correct angle.- The number
six seems to have been essential to them. Or sacred. It
is from this, and from the size and shape of the door-
ways, windows, and the likeЧnot to mention the width
of the walkwaysЧthat we have some idea of what the
natives must have been like. We hypothesize that they
were rather like a top, or turnip shape, with six limbs
which may have been tentacles usable for walking or
as hands. We suspect that things naturally came m
sixes to themЧtheir mathematics, their architecture,
maybe they even had six eyes all around. Judging from
the doors and allowing for clearance, they were about
two meters tall on the average and possibly wider than
that at the waistЧwhich is where we believe the six
arms, tentacles, or whatever were centered, and'that
must be why the doorways widen at that point." /

They stood there awhile, trying to imagine such
creatures living in the rooms, moving up and down the
boulevards.

"We'd best be getting back to camp," Skander said
at last. "You will have ample time to study here and
to poke into every nook and cranny of the place." They
would, in fact, be there a year, working under the pro-
fessor at the University station.

They walked quickly in the lighter gravity and
reached the base camp about five kilometers from the
city gates in under an hour.

The camp itself looked like some collection of great
tents of a strange circus, nine in all, bright white like
the pressure suits. Long tubes connecting the tents
occasionally flexed as the monitoring computers contin-