"Easton, Tom - Real Men Don't Bark at Fire Hydrants" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

REAL MEN DON'T BARK AT FIRE HYDRANTS

Tom Easton
Box 2724, RFD 2
Belfast, ME O4915
(2O7) 338-1O74




1. UFO Slime Devours Israel!



Mickey Gorgonzola sighed into the phone. "It's just a bit of fungus, Larry.
That's all it is."

While the man on the other end of the line insisted he was wrong, Mickey
rocked his head in his hand and thought, If only I were! He had wished that UFOs
were real ever since he first heard the term at the age of eight.

"What does Israel have to do with it, Larry?" Mickey asked emphatically
even though he knew better. "It's the Holy Land? Someone faxes Tits'n'Tats to
say he saw a UFO land, and he went out in the desert and found a dent in the
sand and a clot of mud with bits of twiggy stuff, and you believe him?" Mickey
wished he could believe.

Now it was Larry's turn to shout. When he obliged, Mickey winced and held
the phone away from his ear.

"What do you mean, I don't have to be insulting? So he sent that photo."
And Larry had faxed it to Mickey. "Have you forgotten what a scale bar means?
Right. That twiggy bit is a tenth of a millimeter long, it can't be anything
except a piece of soil fungus, and they used a scanning electron microscope to
take that photo."

He didn't have to wince this time, but it was still very clear that he
wasn't getting through. "Yeah, it's first cousin to a toadstool." The closest he
could hope Tittles and Tattles would come to the truth would be a headline
screaming: "THE TOADSTOOL FROM BEYOND THE SKY!!!"

He used a pencil to draw a Kilroy on the edge of the photo while Larry
confirmed his cynicism. When the other paused for breath, he said as gently as
he could, "It isn't real, Larry. If it was... Remember when NASA was getting
ready to put landers on the Moon? The Vikings on Mars? ... So I'll fill you in.
They put a lot of effort into sterilizing everything. They didn't want to take a
chance that something from Earth would get loose and multiply and become the
slime that ate a world. So maybe..."

And there was another headline: "UFO SLIME DEVOURS ISRAEL!!"