"Clark, Brian - The Man Who Walked On The Ceiling" - читать интересную книгу автора (Clark Brian)

6190 words THE MAN WHO WALKED ON THE CEILING
by
J. Brian Clarke


"He fell out of the sky, you say? Literally?"
"Damn right. Splat into the middle of a field."

-----------------

It was a fine Friday morning. His mother was away for a
few days, so the house was quiet. Perhaps a little too quiet
for 7.00 am. Still half asleep, George Harold Kalewiski
stretched luxuriously and wriggled his toes. The morning sun
penetrated the small gap above the closed blinds, forming
thousands of tiny elongated shadows from the raised bumps of
the stippled ceiling.
It was like a landscape.
Correction. It was a landscape. An endless, monotonous
desert whose dunes were side-illuminated by the rising glare
of an alien sun. Casting its own looming shadow (in shape,
remarkably similar to the ceiling light-fixture in another
life), was a two-hundred meter dome which had once been a
ship; a mighty interstellar ark which brought the last
remanent of humanity to this fourth planet of Epsilon
Eridani. The terraforming was a slow process; it would be at
least another couple of generations before people could
venture outside without protection. But the oxygen level was
already up to six percent, and the current mean daily
temperature of forty-five degrees celsius was certainly not
the hellish sixty-three degrees of a quarter of a century
ago.
George touched the controls of his lift belt and
drifted downward toward the lock on the Ark's north side. It
had been a tough fourteen hour grind to get Air Plant M-6 up
to spec, but finally the monster was happily chewing up
rocks as it belched its life-giving residue into the
atmosphere.
He drifted lower, the antigrav bearing him smoothly
over those silly, regularly spaced dunes.
His stomach growled.
A dog barked.
A couple of kids screamed at each other, and the
morning newspaper arrived at the front door with a thud.
George sighed. Although his mind games were getting
better, and were certainly more entertaining than the slop
served up on the idiot box, he never seemed to be able to
maintain his concentration long enough. Just when things
would start to get interesting, so-called reality always
intruded and dragged him back to the mundane. Even his