"Dafydd ab Hugh, Brad Linaweawer DOOM: Endgame (english)" - читать интересную книгу автора

furniture styles. My own, next to Arlene's down
toward the hull in heavier acceleration, had a couple
of sit-kneels, a table I could only reach by standing
and stretching, and a doughnut-shaped bed-couch.
I had no idea what was inside Sears and Roebuck's
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.