"ab Hugh, Dafydd & Linaweaver, Brad - Doom 04 - Endgame 1.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (ab Hugh Dafydd)

quarters because they had not allowed Arlene or me
even to sneak a peek. I stood outside the door and
pounded the pine, as we used to say at Parris Island,
then I thought better of it—Sears and Roebuck had
been acting awfully weird lately. I stepped off to one
side in case they decided to burn right through the
door with a weapon.
Silence. After the second pounding, their shared
voice came back with a carefully enunciated "go to
away!"
"Open up, Sears and Roebuck!" shouted Arlene,
exasperated after just ten seconds of dealing with
their intransigence.
"Jeez, you'd never make it as a therapist, A.S."
"I follow the flashlight-pounded-into-the-head
school of psychiatry," she said, and for the first time,
it almost sounded as if her heart were in the joke.
"Go to elsewhere!"
"What are you?" I demanded. "Afraid of dying?
Why? You can't die!"
During a long pause, I heard furniture being shoved
around. Then the door slid open a crack and two
heads, one atop the other, pressed two eyes to the
crack. "We once had our spine broken," they said.
They didn't have spines, exactly; their central nervous
system ran right down the center, from what I had
seen in their medical records. But it was actually more
easily severed than ours because it wasn't protected
by a bone sheath.
"You recovered as soon as someone found you,"
Arlene pointed out. "Right?"
"We lay for eleven days into the jungle on [unintelli-
gible planet name]. The Freds slay us will kill us and
display-put us on for eternity and throw head-leaves
at us." Sears and Roebuck still had a hard time with
English, despite ambassadorial status.
"Come on, S and R," I tried. "Get a grip. You don't
see me and Arlene cringing—and if we die, we're
gone forever!"
They said something too quietly to catch; it
sounded like "we wish we could," but it could have
been "the less you could."
"S and R, Arlene and I need your help. We need to
make a plan for when we hit dirtside on Fredworld."
"Fredpills," added Arlene in my ear.
"And we need you to show us how to synthesize
enough Fredpills to keep us alive to Fredworld ... we
need about, oh, two hundred and seventy."
Sears and Roebuck did a fast calculation—forty-
five days times two people times three meals per day.