"Spider Robinson - The Free Lunch" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Spider)

He was startled speechless.

"You're sensitive to the place," she said. "I must have known it somehow. Thank God - I was beginning to
think I was nuts." She got up from the bed; he heard her start to get dressed. "Throw your pants on," she
said. "We're going for a walk."

He closed his eyes and retraced his steps. His clothes were folded and stacked on a night table on his side of
the bed; he was ready before Annie had finished strapping her Command Band on her wrist and beeping the
door lock open.

She did not bother to turn on a light, since neither of them needed one. He followed the whisper of her
clothes through the dark.

He had expected light in the corridor, but had assumed for some reason that it would be damped down to
night level. It was daytime bright. He ducked and flinched . . . then hurried after her, blinking furiously.

Shortly they came to a service elevator. He made a mark on the map he had been making in his head on the
way . . . and, without thinking about it, also created and stored a mirror-reversed copy of that map, so that if
something went wrong and they had to come back out of that elevator at a dead run, he wouldn't have to
waste half a second doing it then. Annie consulted the Command Band on her wrist, put her ear to the
elevator door, and only then pushed the button; he filed that, too. The car arrived quickly, and he followed her
in.
"Elevator, top level," she told it. "Lights out."

The car darkened, and they went up - slowly at first, but soon fast. Just as he began fumbling around for a
handhold he realized he didn't need it anymore: they were there.

The moment the door opened, he knew where they were: the uppermost reach of Johnny's Tree. Its magic
was not functioning at the moment - he could still see Annie, for instance, and the nets that caught you if you
fell were also visible now, or nearly, gleaming translucently in the moonlight. But the spot was unmistakable.
All of Strawberry Fields was laid out thirty or forty meters below them. In the distance you could make out the
Bridge of Birds, and beyond that a little of Rogero's Castle, the Hippogriff asleep atop it now. It was one of
Mike's favorite vantage points in Dreamworld - and only partly because during the day it conferred invisibility
on all who came here. ("No one - I think - is in my tree," Johnny had said in the song for which this part of
Dreamworld was named.)

Annie paused before leaving the elevator, so he did, too. He assumed she was scanning for possible
observers, either up here or down on the ground, with her eyes or ears or, for all he knew, nose. But he was
wrong.

"I'm rushing this," she said. "Elevator, hold."

She sounded irritated. He looked closer, squinting in the poor light, and she looked irritated, too. "What's the
matter?"

She hesitated. "Do you believe in magic?" she asked suddenly.

He blinked. "Of course."

She looked even more annoyed. "Let me try again. Do you believe the magic in Dreamworld is real, capital M