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

barking! What? At the fire hydrant. That man on the sidewalk. He's..."

He sighed much as he had for Larry Castle. "Yes, Angela... It's coming," he
said as soon as his agent paused for breath. "I know it's just a proposal. I
know I've been working on it for two weeks already."

He winced and tilted the phone away from his ear. "I want the advance as
much as you do. But you know you can't rush these things, Angela... No, that
barking idiot showed up for the first time just before your call."

The shirt-sleeved executive was still on his knees, still barking at the
fire hydrant. What was wrong with him? He couldn't possibly be normal, could he?
Normal people didn't do such things.

Although they did sometimes act quite strange.

He glanced at his computer. What he had accomplished in two weeks didn't
quite fill the screen. "You'll have it by next week. Cross my heart. That's a
promise."

As soon as he hung up the phone, he put his head in both hands. Next week,
he thought. He had less than a page. He needed at least ten.

Once that had been a day's work. But then he had realized that what he was
writing were nothing more than travel books for armchair explorers who preferred
a vicarious quest for bug-eyed aliens to one for the last of the Tasaday.

This one would be just like all the rest, and the very thought of writing
it bored him to madness.

Though the quest itself had been as fascinating as ever.

It had begun last spring, when Larry Castle called to tell him that a
Russian stringer had reported that a hunter had shot down a 50-pound butter~fly
with a six-foot wingspread. Mickey had been skeptical--Mother Nature had laws
against bugs that big, after all. But when Larry asked him to investigate the
story for Tits'n'Tats, he had accepted the assignment. He had then spent the
month of July in the Komi Republic northeast of Moscow. Unfortunately, there had
been no sign of the stringer, the hunter, or trophy-sized butterflies, dead or
alive.

What he had found instead was the museum in Syktyvkar, the Komi capital,
and its permanent exhibit of paintings by UFO contactees. Several of the
paintings supposedly showed the giant butterflies, though they looked more like
a three-year-old's fingerpaint renditions of flowers without stems.

And two weeks before, when he had told Angela Colby the story and shown her
his photos, she had decided it would be his next book.

He stood up and leaned over his laser printer once more. The executive was