"Thomas A. Easton - Alien Resonance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

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ALIEN RESONANCE

Tom Easton
Box 2724, RFD 4
Belfast, ME 04915
207-338-1074

a novella of about 25,300 words

I


Alec Strange balanced on a lichen-covered boulder. Other boulders lay to right
and left, rounded humps and tilted slabs set in a matrix of sand and gravel and
broken sticks. The heavy boughs of balsam firs swayed at his back, saplings of
birch and maple thrusting up among them. Sunlight striking through new growth
bathed him in cool, soft green.
He faced a deep pool set about with granite and shale, its waters darkened by
the juices of rotting leaves. Glints of sun soaked into the brook, glowing
brown. Dabs of foam drifted on the current. Shadows marked the bottom, and a
hollow fell away beneath a steep-sided rock.
When Alec cast his fly over the pool's deepest spot, a gray-green shape sped
from the dark below. His heart began to race. He grinned, his hand tensed on the
rod, and a moment later he held an eight-inch trout in his hand.
Then he moved on, stepping from his boulder to another, savoring the crunch of
lichen, the cushion of moss, the brush of fir across his cheek. He moved up the
stream, following a redstart as it soared bright from shade to sun. He stepped
over a cleft in the rock, and he paused.
Beneath him gleamed something odd. He shifted his feet, laid down his rod, and
bent to thrust his arm shoulder-deep into a miniature, gravel-bottomed canyon.
He touched strangeness, a golden ovoid as out of place in these woods as a
Cadillac. He scraped it with his nails, rapped it with his knuckles, measured it
with his eyes. Its metallic luster deceived, for though it rang lightly at his
touch, it seemed less like gold than like some high-quality ceramic, a giant egg
perhaps two feet long. He wondered at the sort of people who would leave such a
thing in wilderness. He wondered if it might not have fallen from a plane,
perhaps a military craft on maneuvers. He wondered if it could be a bomb.
But he did not wonder long or hard. A bomb seemed unlikely, the other
possibilities irrelevant. His curiosity was easily satisfied for now, and his
mind was on his fishing. Perhaps, he thought, he would pry it from its crack on
his way back to camp. If nothing else, his friends would be intrigued.



To Walter Ybarra, the rocks along the brook meant much more than they did to
Alec Strange. Alec taught English at the university a hundred miles away. Ybarra
was a geologist. Shade and coolness and fragrance and birdsong were not lost on
him, but he saw more deeply. He noted the split and eroded layers of the local