"Wolfe, Gene - The Urth Of The New Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Wolfe Gene)

and I was ravenously hungry. I said, "If I belong in this
collection of exotic brutes, it's up to you to see I'm fed.
Where is the galley?"
Idas hesitated for a moment, quite plainly debating
some sort of exchange of information--he would direct
me if I would first answer seven questions about Urth, or
something of that sort. Then he realized I was ready to
knock him down if he said anything of the kind, and he
told me, though sullenly enough, how to get there.
One of the advantages of such a memory as mine, which
stores everything and forgets nothing, is that it is as good
as paper at such times. (Indeed, that may be its only
advantage.) On this occasion, however, it did me no more
good than it had when I had tried to follow the directions
of that lochage of the peltasts whom I met upon the bridge
of Gyoll. No doubt Idas had assumed I knew more of the
ship than I did, and that I would not count doors and look
for turnings with exactness.
Soon I realized I had gone wrong. Three corridors
branched where there should have been only two, and a
promised stair did not appear. I retraced my path, found
the point at which (as I believed) I had become lost, and
began again. Almost at once, I found myself treading a
broad, straight passageway such as Idas had told me led to
the galley. I assumed then that my wanderings had sent me
wide of part of the prescribed route, and I strode along in
high spirits.
By the standards of the ship, it was a wide and windy
place indeed. No doubt it was one that received its
atmosphere directly from the devices that circulated and
purified it, for it smelled as a breeze from the south does on
a rainy day in spring. The floor was neither of the strange
grass I had seen before nor of the grillwork I had already
come to hate, but polished wood deeply entombed in clear
varnish. The walls, which had been of a dark and deathly
gray in the crew's quarters, were white here, and once or
twice I passed padded seats that stood with their backs
toward the walls.
The passageway turned and turned again, and I felt that
it was rising ever so slightly, though the weight I lifted with
my steps was so slight I could not be certain. There were
pictures on the walls, and some of these pictures moved--once
a picture of our ship as it might have been limned
by someone far distant; I could not help but stop to look,
and I shuddered to think how near I had come to seeing it so.
Another turn--but one that proved not to be a turn,
only the termination of the passageway in a circle of doors.
I chose one at random and stepped into a narrow gangway
so dark, after the white passage, that I could hardly see
more than the lights overhead.