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

distance and showed her the sun, like a burning beach ball, and the
earth circling it along with some peas and several tennis balls,
Hayley was by no means convinced. When he told her that it was
the earth spinning that made day and night, and the earth circling
the sun that made winter and summer, Hayley still thought he
might be wrong. Because it was just pictures on a screen, she
suspected they were no more real than Donald Duck or Tom and
Jerry. And when Grandad told her that the peas and tennis balls
were other planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn,
Neptune, Pluto—like Earth, and that the tiny things shooting
around them in orbits the shape of safety pins were comets, Hayley
felt indignant and jealous for Earth, for not being the only one. It
took her months to accept that this was the way things were.
She only really accepted it when Grandad began showing her
other things. He showed her the slow growth of Earth from a bare
ball of rock, through agelong changes of climate, during which the
lands moved about on its surface like leaves floating on a pond, and
rocks grew and turned to sand. He showed her dinosaurs and tiny
creatures in the sea bed. Then he showed her atoms, molecules and
germs—after which Hayley for a long time confused all three with
planets going round the sun and, when Grandma insisted that you
washed to get rid of germs, wondered if Grandma was trying to
clean the universe off her.
Grandad showed her the universe too, where the Milky Way was
like a silver scarf of stars, and other stars floated in shapes that
were supposed to be people, swans, animals, crosses and crowns. He
also showed Hayley the table of elements, which seemed to her to
be something small but heavy, fixed into the midst of all the other
floating, spinning, shining strangeness. She thought the elements
were probably little number-shaped tintacks that pegged the rest in
place.
Grandma had a tendency to object to Grandad showing Hayley
such things. Grandma was liable to march in when Hayley was
peacefully settled in front of a cartoon or a plan of the universe and
snap the OFF button, saying it was not suitable for Hayley to
watch. She always went through the books Grandad gave Hayley
too, and took away things like Fanny Hill and The Rainbow and
Where the Rainbow Ends and Pilgrim’s Progress . Hayley never
understood quite why these were unsuitable. But the time when
Grandma came close to banning all computer displays was when
Grandad showed Hayley the mythosphere.
This was an accident really. It was raining, so that Hayley could
not go out for her usual afternoon walk on the common. Grandma
went to have her rest. Grandad had just come home that morning
from one of his mysterious absences. Grandad usually vanished two
or three times a year. When Hayley asked where he was, Grandma
looked forbidding and answered, “He’s gone to visit his other family.
Don’t be nosy.” Grandad never talked about this at all. When
Hayley asked where he had been, he pretended not to hear. But she
was always truly glad when he came back. The house felt very