"Timothy Zahn - The Green and the Gray" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

and enough light was pressing its way through to clearly show Melantha still wrapped in her
blankets on the couch.
There was more than enough to show the silhouette of someone on the balcony.
Call 911! was his first reflexive impulse. But an instant later he realized that would be a useless
gesture. By the time the cops arrived, the intruder would be long gone. Or would have broken in and
murdered all three of them.
And Roger had nothing to defend them with except a few carving knives and a stupid little toy gun.
A toy gun which nevertheless looked very real.
The shadow shifted as the intruder moved stealthily across the balcony. Easing his way back into the
kitchen, Roger went to the junk drawer and dug beneath Caroline's latch-hook stuff.
The gun was gone.
For a long moment his fingers scrabbled frantically among the collected odds and ends. It couldn't be
gone. He'd put it right here only yesterday.
In the living room, Melantha stirred beneath her blankets, and he grimaced. Of courseтАФthe girl had
taken it. She'd searched through the drawers after he and Caroline had gone to bed and retrieved it.
He stepped back out of the kitchen. The shadow had disappeared, but he could hear a faint scratching
sound. Was the intruder trying to find a way through the doors?
Most of the kitchen knives were down the hall in the bedroom, where he'd taken them while Caroline
was hunting up a spare toothbrush. But the one he'd left on the knickknack shelf last night when the
cops arrived was still there. Sliding it out from behind the plate, he wrapped it in a firm grip and
started across the living room.


file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Timothy%20Zahn%20-%20The%20Green%20and%20the%20Gray.htm (30 of 424)22-12-2006 15:57:21
The Green and the Gray

The twenty-foot walk seemed to take forever. Reaching the curtains, he crouched down and silently
rolled the broomstick up out of the track onto the carpet. Then, straightening up again, he stepped to
the other end of the door and slid his hand around the edge of the curtain. Taking a deep breath, he
popped the latch, shoved the door to the side, and leaped out onto the balcony, knife at the ready.
There was no one there.
He looked back and forth twice. There was nobody skulking in a corner; no ropes hanging down
from above; no grappling hooks on the balcony wall leading up from below. Nothing but Caroline's
stupid dwarf orange trees.
But someone had been there. He hadn't dreamed the sound or the moving shadow. He shifted his
attention to his left, wondering if someone could have leaped across from the next balcony.
And there, sixty feet away at the far corner of the building, was the silhouetted figure of a man.
Hanging onto the outside wall like a human fly.
Roger stared, a creeping sensation twisting through his stomach. The man wasn't standing on a
ladder, his eyes and brain noted mechanically: he was on a section of the wall between balconies,
with no place for a ladder to be braced. He wasn't hanging from a rope or trapeze: the roof overhang
would have left him dangling a couple of feet out from the wall, and he was instead snugged right up
against the stone facing.
And then, as Roger watched, he began to climb. Not like people climbed walls in movies, where
there was always just that little bit of something wrong in balance or flow or movement that betrayed
the presence of the hidden wires. The man's hands reached up one at a time, pressing against the wall
and pulling as the alternate foot lifted and pushed. He moved as casually as if he were walking down
the street; but at the same time, Roger could sense the genuine exertion of muscles working at their
task. It looked real.
It was real.