"Frank Herbert - Dune 1 - Dune (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.
"I heard you coming down the hall," Paul said. "And I heard you open the door."
"The sounds I make could be imitated."
"I'd know the difference."
He might at that, Hawat thought. That witch-mother of his is giving him the deep training,
certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that? Maybe that's why they sent the old
Proctor here -- to whip our dear Lady Jessica into line.
Hawat pulled up a chair across from Paul, sat down facing the door. He did it pointedly,
leaned back and studied the room. It struck him as an odd place suddenly, a stranger-place with
most of its hardware already gone off to Arrakis. A training table remained, and a fencing mirror
with its crystal prisms quiescent, the target dummy beside it patched and padded, looking like an
ancient foot soldier maimed and battered in the wars.
There stand I, Hawat thought.
"Thufir, what're you thinking?" Paul asked.
Hawat looked at the boy. "I was thinking we'll all be out of here soon and likely never see
the place again."
"Does that make you sad?"
"Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place." He glanced at the
charts on the table. "And Arrakis is just another place."
"Did my father send you up to test me?"
Hawat scowled -- the boy had such observing ways about him. He nodded. "You're thinking it'd
have been nicer if he'd come up himself, but you must know how busy he is. He'll be along later."


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"I've been studying about the storms on Arrakis."
"The storms. I see."
"They sound pretty bad."
"That's too cautious a word: bad. Those storms build up across six or seven thousand
kilometers of flatlands, feed on anything that can give them a push -- coriolis force, other
storms, anything that has an ounce of energy in it. They can blow up to seven hundred kilometers
an hour, loaded with everything loose that's in their way -- sand, dust, everything. They can eat
flesh off bones and etch the bones to slivers."
"Why don't they have weather control?"
"Arrakis has special problems, costs are higher, and there'd be maintenance and the like. The
Guild wants a dreadful high price for satellite control and your father's House isn't one of the
big rich ones, lad. You know that."
"Have you ever seen the Fremen?"
The lad's mind is darting all over today, Hawat thought.
"Like as not I have seen them," he said. "There's little to tell them from the folk of the
graben and sink. They all wear those great flowing robes. And they stink to heaven in any closed
space. It's from those suits they wear -- call them 'stillsuits' -- that reclaim the body's own
water."
Paul swallowed, suddenly aware of the moisture in his mouth, remembering a dream of thirst.
That people could want so for water they had to recycle their body moisture struck him with a
feeling of desolation. "Water's precious there," he said.
Hawat nodded, thinking: Perhaps I'm doing it, getting across to him the importance of this
planet as an enemy. It's madness to go in there without that caution in our minds.