"Blaylock, James P - The War Of The Worlds" - читать интересную книгу автора (Blaylock James P)

She picked up the birdcage from where it sat on the driveway and put it carefully back into the car, then climbed wearily into the front seat and belted in, waiting for him. There was a red glow in the air out over the hills, and he thought at once that it was the alien laser light, consuming the sky, but then he realized that it was merely the dawn, that the sun was rising on a warm and cloudless fall morning. He picked his way across the lawn, which was strewn with the litter of their livesЧboth of their lives, since Lisa had never had the chance to return her own stuff to the car from where he had ditched it.

The sound of the loudspeaker squawked again from up the road, breaking in on his thoughts. If the truck made the same circuit it had before, it wouldn't take thirty seconds for it to get down here.Е

He climbed in beside her and backed out, heading downhill and around the corner onto Grizzly Peak, where right away he saw activity in the street aheadЧcars stopped, uniformed men milling around, leaning in open windows to say something to the evacuees. The first of the cars in line made a U-turn and motored back up hill, throttling past them. The driver's face, visible in the glow of the instrument panel, was full of a visible rage, as if he had just been insulted beyond words.

"What the hell is this now?" Ed asked, but Lisa didn't respond. The parakeets chattered happily in the back seat. He rolled down the window and nodded at an officer, apparently a fireman, who stepped off the curb and approached the Escort.

"You folks can go home," he said. "Excitement's over. Sorry for the panic."

"It's over?" Ed asked. "What the hell was it?" All that for nothing, he thought. But then he glanced over at Lisa and realized that it hadn't been for nothing; he wasn't that lucky. It might be the end of the world, one way or another. The aliens had won without firing a shot. "What was all that racket back in the hills?"

"Some kind of performance artists from Cal." The man shrugged. His face was bland. Clearly he wasn't happy to be up this early either, and he looked at Ed's bowling shirt now, as if he didn't quite understand why Ed would want to wear it over the top of his sweater like that.

"Artists?" Ed asked. This was astonishing.

"Yeah. They didn't file a permit. Had a bunch of sound equipment and some kind of high-tech holographic stuff that they trucked back into the hills on an access road. Just a prank."

Lisa laughed suddenly, shaking her head as if she'd just figured out the punch line to a joke. Apparently mystified, the fireman ducked a little in order to look in at her.

"It's October thirtieth," she said, and laughed again, shaking her head as if it beat all.

Ed patted her on the thigh good-naturedly. Clearly she'd snapped. And it was his fault, of course. His response to an apparent alien invasion had been to attack his own wife in an insidious and incomprehensible way.

"I'm sorry?" the fireman asked.

"October thirtieth, 1938Чthat's the night Orson Welles pulled the War of the Worlds prank."

The man looked as if he'd been pole-axed. "The tripods thing! He did that radio show! Well, I'll be damned.Е"

He laughed now and stepped away from the car, motioning Ed forward. Other cars had stopped behind them, and the Escort was blocking traffic. They made an easy U-turn and headed back uphill, Lisa still chuckling to herself. Through the open window, Ed heard the fireman shouting the news to one of his cohorts, the mystery solved to everyone's satisfaction. He swung the car back up into the neighborhood, and between two houses he got a glimpse of the eastern sky, ablaze with color. The tall houses and curb trees shaded the streets and sidewalks, though, and there was still a lot of darkness in the morning.

He sensed that Lisa was looking at him, and he glanced in her direction as if he were checking his passenger-side blind spot, even though there was no lane there. In fact she was staring at him, an expectant grin on her face, as if she had seen the joke and wondered if he had, and when their eyes met, she burst into laughter again. "You've got to admit it's funny," she said, shaking her head in amused wonder. "The prank, I mean." The parakeets in the backseat took up their merry chatter again, as if they, at least, were cheerful enough to admit anything.

Ed tried to laugh, but the sound he made was inhuman, and he was abruptly silent. The drive home, only half a mile, seemed an eternity now, and yet he dreaded arriving. But there was the bottom of their street just ahead, and as he turned the car toward home, he saw in the early morning twilight the Bords' farthest-flung trash can lying in the gutter. Scattered, car-flattened trash littered the street above it. He glanced at Lisa again. She had a beatific half-smile on her face that was impossible to read. He slowed down a little as they passed the fallen trash can, then pointed toward the hills, hunkering down and looking out through the windshield. "What's that?" he asked, knowing exactly what it wasЧa news helicopter sweeping low over the woods, getting the story.

Lisa peered up through the window, though, turning her head away, and at once he bent over and squinted into the side mirror, looking back down at the galvanized mouth of the Bords' trash can, facing uphill so that it caught the first rays of the morning sun like a glowing metal halo. Inside the half-filled can lay the discarded bowling ball, a shining black hole against the white aurora of a kitchen trash bag.


The End