"Duane, Diane - Tos - Spock's World" - читать интересную книгу автора (Duane Diane)

heat came streaming into the room, into the silence. G
Sarek leaned back and closed his eyes, and became
E still, tried to become the stillness, the warmth. B.
he failed: the stillness was an illusion. His mind was
in disorderly turmoil. He would have been
embarrassed at that, except that it would have made the
turmoil worse.
If I fail in this, he thought, then my honor
is in shreds and my family will bear the stigma of it
forever. We will be ostracized. If I succeed . .
. then my honor is intact and my conscience will
remain whole. But my House will be broken . . .
or if not, 1 will become an exile and outcast. And
Earth. . .
He opened his eyes. Out the window of the tow a
erblock, a redtailed hawk was balancing on the
hot j wind, as if on an unresolved
thought, hovering. In the blue sky far behind it, past
hills like cut-out cardboard, cream-white clouds
piled along the horizon, basking j and building in
the heat, forging their thunders. Earth will be dead to us,
Sarek thought, and got up to make the call he had
been avoiding.
Looking down from space, the miles-deep sea of
atmosphere that breeds thunders and winds takes on

another perspective. The endless star-pierced
blackness presses down against a thin delicate
wrapping of air, a bubble of glass swirled with
white, glittering where the Sun touches it, the blue
of oceans showing through the faintly misted shell. A
fragile thing, brittlelooking, an objet d'art,
round and perfect: but for how long? From far enough out in
orbit, one has no doubt that one could drop the
Earth on the floor of night and break it. An
urge arises to step softly, to speak quietly, so
as to keep whoever might be carrying the pretty toy from
being startled and fumbling it. That view, the wide
curve of the planet, blue and brown and green
streaked with white, was the one that Spock kept on the
viewscreen by preference when he was alone on the
bridge. He was alone now; indeed he had
been alone now for nearly sixteen days, except
for the briefest interruptions by maintenance crew and the
occasional visiting bridge-crew member. It was
curious haw, even though they were on liberty, they
could not seem to stay away.
But then Jim would surely say that it was curious
that Spock couldn't stay away, either. And he would have
laughed at Spock's grave attempts