"Gardner Dozois - Chains of the Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

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Chains of the Sea
by Gardner Dozois
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Copyright (c)1973 Gardner Dozois
First published in Chains of the Sea, ed. Robert Silverberg, Nelson, 1973

Fictionwise Contemporary
Science Fiction


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One day the aliens landed, just as everyone always said they would.
They fell out of a guileless blue sky and into the middle of a clear, cold
November day, four of them, four alien ships drifting down like the snow that
had been threatening to fall all week. America was just shouldering its way
into daylight as they made planetfall, so they landed there: one in the
Delaware Valley about fifteen miles north of Philadelphia, one in Ohio, one in
a desolate region of Colorado, and one -- for whatever reason -- in a cane
field outside of Caracas, Venezuela. To those who actually saw them come down,
the ships seemed to fall rather than to descend under any intelligent control:
a black nailhead suddenly tacked to the sky, coming all at once from nowhere,
with no transition, like a Fortean rock squeezed from a high appearing-point,
hanging way up there and winking intolerably bright in the sunlight; and then
gravity takes hold of it, visibly, and it begins to fall, far away and
dream-slow at first, swelling larger, growing huge, unbelievably big, a
mountain hurled at the earth, falling with terrifying speed, rolling in the
air, tumbling end over end, overhead, coming down -- and then it is sitting
peacefully on the ground; it has not crashed, and although it didn't slow down
and it didn't stop, there it _is_, and not even a snowflake could have settled
onto the frozen mud more lightly.
To those photo reconnaissance jets fortunate enough to be flying a
routine pattern at thirty thousand feet over the Eastern Seaboard when the
aliens blinked into their airspace, to the automatic, radar-eyed,
computer-reflexed facilities at USADCOM Spacetrack East, and to the United
States Aerospace Defense Command HQ in Colorado Springs, although they didn't
have convenient recon planes up for a double check -- the picture was
different. The high-speed cameras showed the landing as a _process_: as if the
alien spaceships existed simultaneously everywhere along their path of
descent, stretched down from the stratosphere and gradually sifting entirely