"Brown, Fredric - KNOCK" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brown Fredric)

it had been done much more efficiently.


But they had given him plenty of books. They'd been nice about that,
as soon as he had told them what he wanted, and he had told them that the
moment he had learned that he was destined to spend the rest of his life
alone in this room. The rest of his life, or as the Zan had quaintly
expressed it, forev-er. Even a brilliant mind - and the Zan obviously had
brilliant minds - has its idiosyncracies. The Zan had learned to speak
Terrestrial English in a manner of hours but they persisted in separating
syllables. But we disgress.
There was a knock on the door.
You've got it all now, except the three dots, the ellipsis, and I'm
going to fill that in and show you that it wasn't horrible at all.
Walter Phelan called out, "Come in," and the door opened. It was of
course, only a Zan. It looked exactly like the other Zan; if there was any
way of telling one of them from another, Walter hadn't found it. It was
about four feet tall and it looked like nothing on earth - nothing, that
is, that had been on Earth until the Zan came there.
Walter said, "Hello, George." When he'd learned that none of them had
names he decided to call them all George, and the Zan didn't seem to mind.
This one said, "Hel-lo, Wal-ter." That was ritual; the knock on the
door and the greetings. Walter waited.
"Point one," said the Zan "You will please hence-forth sit with your
chair turned the other way."
Walter said, "I thought so, George. That plain wall is transparent
from the other side, isn't it?"
"It is trans-par-ent."
"Just what I thought I'm in a zoo Right?"
"That is right."
Walter sighed. "I knew it. That plain, blank wall, without a single
piece of furniture against it. And made of something different from the
other walls. If I persist in sitting with my back to it, what then? You
will kill me? - I ask hopefully."
"We will take a-way your books."
"You've got me there George. All right I'll face the other way when I
sit and read. How many other animals besides me are in this zoo of yours?"
"Two hun-dred and six-teen."
Walter shook his head. "Not complete, George. Even a bush league zoo
can beat that - could beat that, I mean, if there were any bush league
zoos left. Did you just pick at random?"
"Ran-dom sam-ples yes All spe-cies would have been too man-y. Male
and female each of one hun-dred and eight kinds,"
"What do you feed them? The carnivorous ones, I mean."
"We make food Syn-thet-ic."
"Smart," said Walter. "And the flora? You got a collection of that,
too?"
"Flo-ra was not hurt by vi-bra-tions. It is all still grow-ing."
"Nice for the flora," said Walter. "You weren't as hard on it, then,
as you were on the fauna, Well, George, you started out with 'point one.'