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

What had that youth, Vamett, said? Perhaps they
had deliberately broken down the system?

Skander's face had a frown as he removed the last
of his pressure suit. Ideas like that marked brilliance
and creativityЧbut they were unsafe thoughts for a
civilization like the one the boy had come from. It
revived those old religious ideas that after perfection
came true death.

Where could he have gotten an idea like that? And
why had he not been caught and stopped?

Skander looked after their naked young bodies as
they filed through the tunnel toward the showers and
dorm.

Only barbarians thought that way.

7

Had the Confederacy guessed what he was up to
here? Was Vamett not the innocent student he was
supposed to be, but the agent of his nightmares?

Did they suspect?

Suddenly he felt very chilly, although the tempera-
ture was constant.

Suppose they all were. . . .

Three months passed. Skander looked at the picture
on his television screen, an electron micrograph of the
cellular tissue brought up a month before by the core

drill.

It was the same pattern as the older discoveriesЧ

that same fine cellular structure, but infinitely more
complex inside than any human or animal cellЧand

so tremendously alien.

And a six-sided cell, at that. He had often wondered
about the why of thatЧhad even their cells been hex-
agonal? Somehow he doubted it, but the way that num-
ber kept popping up he wouldn't disbelieve it, either.