"James Alan Gardner - Gravity Wells" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gardner James Alan)

Muffin talked and Mom talked and one of the bald guys said something, and finally Mom came in all
pale-looking.

"They want lemonade," she said. "Take them out some lemonade. And plastic glasses. I'm going
to lie down." Then Mom went upstairs.

I took out a pitcher of lemonade. When I got there, one of the bald guys got up to meet me and
asked Muffin, "Is this the boy?"

She said yes.

"Most wondrous, most wondrous!"

He put both hands on my shoulders as if he was going to hug me, but Muffin said, "You'll spill
the lemonade." He let me go but kept staring at me with big weepy eyes.

"What's going on?" I asked.

"The culmination of a thousand thousand years of aimless wandering," the guy said.

"Not aimless," Muffin cut in.

"Your pardon," he answered, quickly lowering his head. "But at times it seemed so."

"You'll be in the temple when it happens," Muffin said to him.

"A million praises!" he shouted, throwing himself flat-faced on the ground. "A billion trillion
praises!" And he started to cry into our lawn. The other two bald guys bowed in the direction of our
garage, over and over again.

"You want to pour me a glass of that?" Muffin said to me.



The next day it was a different guy, with a big beard and carrying a sword almost as tall as me.
When I opened the door, he grabbed the front of my T-shirt and yelled, "Where is the Liar, the
Deceiver, the Blasphemer, the She-Whore Who Mocks the Most High?"
 "She went with Uncle Dave down to the Dairy Queen."

"Thank you," he said, and walked off down the street. Later, I heard on the radio the cops had
arrested him in the parking lot of the mall.



The next day Muffin told me I had to take her down to the boatyards. I told her I didn't have to
do it if I didn't want.

"Shows how much you know," she said. "You don't know anything about teleology or fate or
anything."