"William Sleator - Interstellar Pig" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sleator William)

captain and his brother. I answered in detail their question about the layout
of the house and spent a lot of time describing the front bedroom, where I had
been sleeping for the past week.

"Still, as nice as the view is, I wouldn't want to

be locked up there for twenty years," I said.

;,┬г They had turned out the floor lamps. In the

ibadowy, firelit room, Zena's eyes glittered like a

Ijjft. "And the scratches Ted informed you about,

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INTCRSTELiAR PIG

were you able to discover them?" she asked, leaning toward me, her voice a
gentle purr.

"Oh, sure. There's a lot of them, and some of them are deep, deeper than you'd
think a person could make with his bare hands. He must have . . . spent a lot
of time making them."

"And did they seem to fall into a kind of pattern or ... or tell a tale or
anything?" Zena asked.

"No. They're completely senseless."

"I don't suppose there was anything else, uh . . . unusual about the chamber,
was there?" Zena said carefully. "Nothing odd, peculiar, that you or your
parents might have stumbled on?"

It was a strange question, and I tried to make a joke out of it. "You mean
like a dead body, or a ghost or something? Uh-uh. No such luck."

But they didn't seem to appreciate my wit. Barely moving their heads, their
eyes met; three pairs of eyes meeting equally somehow, as though there were
only two of them. And I thought of the jagged pits and troughs in the
windowsills of my room, and I felt uneasy for the first time. A curtain
flapped gently at the window. The others in the room remained as still as
reptiles in the sun.

"So you travel a lot?" I said, breaking the uncomfortable silence. "That must
be great. Where's your home base? What was your last trip?" :
"You certainly do ask a plethora of questions," Manny said.

"I do?" I said. "Funny. It seems to me like you're I the ones who've been
asking me questions all eve- ! ning." j