"Jean and Jeff Sutton - Lord Of The Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sutton Jean and Jeff)

ground. Frightening rumbling noises churned across the heavens.
"That is a storm," Zandro explained. Danny retreated fearfully to the
ship, locking the hatch behind him. In a short while he heard the wind rising.
Deep growling noises rumbled across the sky, followed by a spattering against
the metal hull which he knew must be caused by the small balls of water. Rain,
Zandro had called it.
After awhile he slept.
 Since then Zandro had explained many things. The sky -- the place Danny
saw when he looked upward -- went on and on and on, never ending. The big
emerald fire in the sky -- the heat he felt at day was caused by the fire --
was a sun. The sun also gave light, which was why the darkness came when the
sun fell below the grassy plain. The small, gleaming lights he saw in the sky
at night also were suns, but they were too far away for their heat to be felt.
And the place on which he lived was a planet.
"Planet?" he asked, when Zandro first told him.
"Planets travel around suns, but they give no heat," Zandro explained.
"Does this planet go around the emerald sun?" he asked wonderingly.
"Yes, and so do other planets -- four more."
Danny gazed disbelievingly at the sky. "Why can't I see them?"
"You could at night if you knew where to look."
"Are they up there with the other suns?"
"Yes, but much closer."
"At night I see a big place in the sky where there are no suns," Danny
said. "Why is that?"
"It's a huge gulf," Zandro replied. He explained how such rifts ran like
rivers through certain parts of the galaxy, separating one mass of suns from
another. The emerald sun was located at the edge of the gulf Danny had asked
about.
Rivers in the sky! Rivers of nothingness! And on each side, great masses
of stars, each hot like the emerald sun. Danny was fascinated. How much Zandro
knew! "You mentioned a galaxy," he said tentatively.
"A galaxy is a great cluster of suns," Zandro explained. "The suns in
our galaxy are as many as the leaves of the forest."
Awed, Danny asked, "Is there more than one galaxy?"
"The number is endless."
"How can anything be endless?" he protested.
"That is the paradox of life," Zandro answered. The galaxy -- a mass of
great burning suns that flamed in a void, yet small when compared with the
whole -- was more than Danny could comprehend.
Another time, sitting beside the blue-green stream in the meadow, he
asked, "Why do you call me Danny?"
"Because that is your name."
"Name?" He contemplated the word.
"Everything that exists has a name," Zandro answered patiently. "Trees,
mountains, rivers, rocks..." As he spoke, Danny experienced a mental image of
each thing named. Zandro talked for a long time, explaining how names were
used to distinguish one thing from another, to group different objects into a
class, or to locate them in time or space. Danny thought that names were quite
wonderful. He was Danny!
But then another thought struck him. "There are lots of suns," he said.