"John Dalmas - Return to Fanglith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dalmas John)

fixed up an old farmhouse, and about a year later
Tarel and Jenoor had come to live with us. Their
parents had joined the resistance on a Federation
planet named Tris Gebleu, and had them smuggled to
Evdash, where they'd been placed with us. They were
twins Deneen's age-sixteen. Soon after, Piet came to
live with us. Add Lady and the two pups, and you get
a pretty full house.

Half an hour in the floater brought us close to home,
but Piet didn't simply land in the yard and punch the
hooter. He flew past about half a mile north at 3,000
feet, while Bubba scanned the place telepathically.
Someone was home all right, he said-two someones-but
they weren't our parents. They were two human males,
playing cards while they waited for their detector to
buzz.
My gut knotted. Had mom and dad escaped or been
hauled away? If they had been arrested, chances were
that Lady and the pups would be hanging around
nearby, living in the forest. But if they'd escaped,
they'd probably all have left together.
Telepathically, Bubba found no sign of Lady or the
pups around, so my guts relaxed a little.

Where we lived, the country was three-quarters woods.
Our house was near the edge of the farm clearing,
with a sod road going by it. Piet put down in the
woods about a mile away. Leaving the others with the
floater, Bubba and I took off at a trot, his esper
senses alert. When we got near the clearing, Bubba,
in his rough grunting version of human speech,
suggested I stay back. I knew it was good advice, but
I didn't like to leave everything to him, so we
continued together to the clearing's edge, creeping
on our bellies the last hundred feet, keeping to
cover, until I could see the house and our big shed.
The shed doors were open and the cutter was gone, but
the floater was still there.

That could mean that my parents had gotten away, or
it could mean that the police had impounded the
cutter. My guess was that they'd gotten away.
Otherwise the police, if they were smart, would have
left the cutter in the shed to fool us, maybe after
taking out the fuel slugs. They probably wouldn't
know our canid was an espwolf. There are lots of
different kinds of canids from the known worlds, and
espwolves are rare. As far as we knew, ours were the
only ones on the continent. Our friends thought Bubba