"Alan Dean Foster - Icerigger 1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

"Yeah, him."

Colette gestured loosely in the direction of the door. "After we discovered that this compartment
was still fairly intact ... he carried you in, by the way ... it seemed the nat-ural place to take
refuge. Conserve body heat, get out of this wind. The emergency boat rations are in this twisted
locker behind me. I'm glad to say they survived, by and large. He had a bite to eat and
disappeared outside. That was some time ago. Ire hasn't come back."

"Quiet sort," put in du Kane. Food dripped from his mouth and he suddenly mopped at it
embarrassedly.

"I expect he'll be all right," put in Williams. "He took one of the two beamers with him. I," he
continued, holding up the little weapon, "have the other. He suggested I use it to discourage any
antisocial actions left in our nemesis, here." He indicated the sullen Walther.

The latter eyed the gun, a bit wistfully, Ethan thought. "Huh! Fat lot of good it'd do me, too!"
He shivered. Apparently he was even colder than Ethan. Several bunched-up shirts, plus an
emergency thermal poncho from the lifeboat's stores gave him a squat look, like a fat frog. But
the poncho hadn't been designed with temperatures like this in mind and the little hood was having
a hard time of it. Well, that was just too bad.

Ethan considered the clothes worn by du Kane and his daughter. They fitted almost perfectly, as if
they'd been made to order in a thranx tailor-shop. Which they might have been. Clearly the
kidnappers wouldn't want their charges to freeze to death. Williams, then, was probably wearing
Walther's fur. He'd already noted the grisly origin of his own.

Well, if someone was destined to freeze to death, he bad no compunctions about nominating the ugly
little man with the busted wing. When he thought of the commissions this little detour was going
to cost him ...

Wait a minute. If he was wearing the dead Kotabit's jacket, and Williams was using Walther's, and
the du Kanes had their own-then that meant the odd Mr. September was prowling around outside
somewhere without a coat. Unless the kid-nappers had carried extras, and that didn't seem likely.
Well, that was September's problem. Just now there were other items uppermost in his mind.

"Any idea," he asked Williams, "where we are?" It was Walther who replied, however.

"We were supposed to land," he began bitterly, "about 200 kilometers southeast of Brass Monkey.
The rendezvous was all arranged. Thanks to several damn delays though, and some bad fusing, we got
caught in the explosion we set in the Antares. Chewed hell out of our navigational capacity. I
can't be sure, the way all those instruments were whining, with a busted 'puter, but I'll bet
we're halfway around the planet. And if you want to buy my chances of getting out of this, you can
have 'em for a 'Sime."

"Set explosion?" prodded Ethan. But Walther had obviously said all he intended to for now. He
lapsed into glum silence and slid further back into his corner.



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