"Aldiss, Brian - Saliva Tree, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

Here is the story which fought Zelazny's "He Who Shapes" to a
standstill for the novella award. It is set not in the far future or
even in the familiar present, but in that curiously bright and
timeless late-Victorian world, glimpsed as if through the wrong
end of a telescope, in which the wonderful events of H. 0.
Wells' stories take place.
The author of this brilliant pastiche was born in the mid-
twenties into the East Anglia depicted as background to "The
Saliva Tree," where many farms still had their own little
electricity generators. He has been Literary Editor of the
Oxford Mail for eight years. He made a happy second marriage
in 1965, now lives in a beautiful old sixteenth-century
thatched house in Oxfordshire, "seeing slightly crazy visions."

Nebula Award, Best Novella 1965 (tied with "He Who Shapes," by Roger Zelazny)
THE SALIVA TREE

Brian W. Aldiss
There is neither speech nor language: but their voices are heard
among them. Psalm xix.
"You know, I'm really much exercised about the Fourth
Dimension," said the fair-haired young man, with a suitable
earnestness in his voice.
"Um," said his companion, staring up at the night sky.
"It seems very much in evidence these days. Do you not
think you catch a glimpse of it in the drawings of Aubrey
Beardsley?"
"Um," said his companion.
They stood together on a low rise to the east of the sleepy
East Anglian town of Cottersall, watching the stars, shivering a
little in the chill February air. They are both young men in their
early twenties. The one who is occupied with the Fourth
Dimension is called Bruce Fox; be is tall and fair, and works as
junior clerk in the Norwich firm of lawyers, Prendergast and
Tout. The other, who has so far vouchsafed us only an urn or
two, although he is to figure largely as the hero of our account,
is by name Gregory Rolles. He is tall and dark, with gray eyes
set in his handsome and intelligent face. He and Fox have
sworn to Think Large, thus distinguishing themselves, at least
in their own minds, from all the rest of the occupants of
Cottersall in these last years of the nineteenth century.
"There's another!" exclaimed Gregory, breaking at last from
the realm of monosyllables. He pointed a gloved finger up at
the constellation of Auriga the Charioteer. A meteor streaked
across the sky like a runaway flake of the Milky Way, and died
in mid-air.
"Beautiful!" they said together.
"It's funny," Fox said, prefacing his words with an oft-used
phrase, "the stars and men's minds are so linked together and