"David Gerrold - Starsiders 1 - Jumping of the Planet" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerrold David)

go!" he whined. "I gotta go to the bathroom! I gotta pee!" That was what he always said when he didn't
want to cooperate. And it usually worked, because what if he was telling the truth?
But right nowтАФWeird wasn't letting go.
"Go ahead," I said, coming up to block his other side. He wasn't running away again.
"Where?" he demanded.
"I dunno," I said in that really bland, passive-aggressive voice I'd learned to use on him. "Do you see
a bathroom around here?"
He looked around. We were a quarter of the way down the wall of the biggest hole in the world, and
we could see forever in all directions. There were no bathrooms, no water faucets, no elevators, no
nothing. Stinky started crying, "But I gotta pee!"
"Well, then, just pee!"
"Where?"
"Here!"
"But everybody'll see!"
"There's no one to see! And besides we're so far away from everything, no one could see anything
anyway. Just go!"
"I can't!"
"Then hold it till we get back to the top!"
"I can't! It's too far!"
"We told you not to come running down."
"But I gotta go!"
"Then go here!"
"I can't!"
The kid was paralyzed. No matter what anyone said, all he could say was "I can't!" So I said, "Well
then, just pee in your pants and stop whining!"
So he did.
Now he was wet, uncomfortable, and smelled bad. But this wasn't as bad as when he threw up in the
cooler and spoiled everyone's lunch, and at least now that we'd gotten Stinky's first accident out of the
way, we could get on with the fun part of the trip. Ha ha.
By this time Dad had realized we weren't following. When he got back down to us, Weird was
yelling at Stinky, "Why did you pee in your pants?" and Stinky was crying full blast that I'd told him to.
That's when Dad did something strange. Stranger than usual. He didn't say anything at all. He stopped
where he was and sat down. He put his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands and he just sat and
stared and looked sullen in that way he gets when he's thinking real hard about somethingтАФlike a bad
decision. I was sure he was thinking about turning around and taking us all back to El Paso.
"Now look what you've doneтАФ" I began to say to Stinky, but Weird swatted me hard across the chest
with the back of his hand and told me to shut up, which actually startled me into silence, because Weird
almost never touches anyone, let alone me.
"What's he doing?" Stinky asked.
Weird shook his head and grunted. "I dunno." He sounded kinda faraway when he said it. That's
when I figured out that something was going on, but nobody had told me yet. Whatever Weird knew, he
wasn't saying.
"Are you all right?" Weird asked.
Dad took a deep breath. "I was thinking about the moon." He pointed out at the big emptiness below
us. "On the moon, there are craters this size everywhere. And bigger ones too. There's nothing special
about a crater on the moon. Could you imagine living every day of your life in a place like this?"
Weird didn't answer. Neither did I. How do you answer a question like that? We just looked at each
other.
Dad took another breath. "Y'know, people say that kids are the hope of the futureтАФthat a baby is the
human race's way of insisting that the universe give us another chance. But I don't know. Sometimes it