"Andre Norton - Cat Fantastic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norton Andre)

established a defense perimeter outside that of the entities who had opened the Gate, and waited.
Silk stalked and growled. She continued yowling. Her fur sparked blue stars when she swished her tail.
Beyond the standing stones-or beyond the opening framed by the three stones-was a sunlit day.

Judith was no longer young, and she had never been pretty. She was far too bright and independent for a
girl of her generation. Loneliness was a curse she did not suffer as a child-not with eleven others in the
family, and she in the middle. As a young woman, getting out, away, earning college money, then workmg
her way through in the company of her best friends, those in books, had taken every moment. When the
time to be lonely arrived, she had learned how to handle it.
Fantasy was so much more satisfactory a place to live than reality that Judith spent much of her life there.
Doing so was both reasoned and intentional. She had a clear, biting sense of what was and what was not.
She simply preferred what was not. Life in booksand beyond them, in places where only her imagination
created worlds-sufficed. Satisfy, it did not, but reality offered so much less that Judith had long since
relegated living in it to such times as she was with others. She wished she could reject it completely.
As she tried, unsuccessfully, to reject the sunlit world beyond the stones.
The cat would not let her. She crawled from under the dashboard screaming in demand to be allowed
out of the door. Shocked, Judith watched the contractions of labor begin in her sides. The cat clawed the
door and screamed again.
"No, no," Judith exclaimed. She reached for the animal, to be met with teeth and claws and infuriated
noises. The cat ripped and tore at the rubber edges of the doors, squirming to get her head between the
flanges. She would kill herself-or her babies.
"All right, all right," Judith yelled at her. "I'll take you out. Wait a minute."
She shoved her arms first into her down jacket, then into the knapsack straps. The cat continued to
scream. Judith picked up the beach towel, threw it over the cat, and stuffed cat and towel into the
backpack. The cat became suddenly silent.
Judith almost stopped. "No, I said I would," she whispered. This time I have really flipped, she thought.
Keeping a promise to a cat, yet?
She could not take her eyes off the brilliant rectangle of sunshine, the green, grassy hills, the hint of a
stream, the likelihood of wildflowers, the ... She grabbed the lever and opened the door. The balky back
door chose this time to open, too. Before she could stop herself, she jumped down into the snow and
stamped to the front of the bus. She could smell spring! She could feel warm wind on her face!
Almost, she waded forward to pass through the open ... gate? Space?
"No," she said aloud. To do that was foolish. She had no way of knowing what really was ... there. If
anything. The Bookmobile had brought them this far; it could take them through. Remaining inside it was
the only protection she had.
She knew the lintel stone to be more than a foot above the top of the bus, the side stones of the ...
entryway ... just far enough apart to let it through-if she folded the rearview mirror back.
As she got ready, she could feel the cat inside the knapsack. The kittens must be coming. A pained yowl
made her wonder if the first one was here. She could not stop.
When she climbed back into the driver's seat, she did not close the door, she just gripped the wheel until
her knuckles went white, then pried her right hand free so she could turn the ignition key. The bus
responded. It was perfectly lined up, as if things were planned-as things were in fantasy. Forward in the
lowest gear.
The front bumper contacted something invisible. Itgave slowly, as if it was heavy but movable. The bus
dug its chains in and shoved. Judith held her breath. The cat squalled again.
They rolled almost through, suddenly, as if the bus was a cork coming out of a bottle ... and stopped.
The back doors had never fit properly. They always stuck out farther than the front ones. The bus was
wedged by the strong, steel doors.
Judith shifted into neutral. She stepped down onto grass. Everything was fuzzy, half-there. She could see
and not see that the bus must have pushed aside a great block of stone. On the other side of the stone