"Diana Wynne Jones - The Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jones Diana Wynne)

never live up to Grandma’s standards. Grandma disapproved of
running and shouting and laughing and singing as well as painting
outside the lines. Her ideas took in the whole world, and Hayley
was always overflowing Grandma’s edges. It occurred to Hayley
now, as she sat on the drawing room sofa, that Grandma must have
had four daughters— no, six, if you counted Mother and the Aunt
Ellie who was in Scotland—and she wondered how on Earth they
had all managed when they were girls.
Luckily, Grandad was never this strict. Unless he was on a phone
to someone important, like Uncle Jolyon or the Prime Minister, he
never really minded Hayley sneaking into one of his work rooms.
“Are your hands clean?” he would say, looking round from whatever
he was doing. And Hayley would nod and smile, knowing this was
Grandad’s way of saying she could stay. She smiled now, and patted
the unreal cat, thinking of her grandfather, huge and bearded, with
his round stomach tightly buttoned into a blue-check shirt, turning
from his screens to point to a book he had found for her, or to put a
cartoon up on another screen for her. Grandad was kind, although
he never seemed to have much idea what was suitable for small
girls. Hayley had several frustrated memories about this. Before
she could read, Grandad had given her a book full of grey drawings
of prisons, thinking she would enjoy looking at it. Hayley had not
enjoyed it at all. Nor, when she had only just learned to read, had
she enjoyed the book called At the Back of the North Wind which
Grandad had pushed into her hands. The print in it was close and
tiny and Hayley could not understand the story.
But Grandad had given her many other books later that she did
enjoy. And he often—and quite unpredictably— showed Hayley
peculiar things on one or other of his computers. The first time he
did this, Hayley was decidedly disappointed. She had been
expecting another cartoon, and here Grandad was, showing her a
picture of a large round rotating football. Light fell on it sideways
as it spun and also fell on the golf ball that was whizzing
energetically round the football, going from round to half-lighted to
invisible as it whizzed.
“This isn’t Tom and Jerry ,” Hayley said.
“No, it’s the earth and the moon,” Grandad said. “It’s time you
learnt what makes day and night.”
“But I know that,” Hayley objected. “Day is when the sun comes
up.”
“And I suppose you think the sun goes round the earth?” Grandad
said.
Hayley thought about this. She knew from the globe in the map
room that the earth was probably round—though she thought
people might well be wrong about that—so it stood to reason that
the sun had to circle round it or people in Australia would have
night all the time. “Yes,” she said.
She was hugely indignant when Grandad explained that the
earth went round the sun, and rather inclined to think Grandad
had got it wrong. Even when Grandad zoomed the football into the