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

ages, and the government was acting delightfully paranoid. The Bolivian crisis,
the power shortages on the West Coast, the Antarctic war for control of all the
fresh water locked in the ice cap, the nation-wide smog from garbage
incinerators that had never worked as designed, all had vanished from the
headlines. The editorials reserved judgment, but Alec thought he detected a note
of approval, of liking for the strange things. He guessed that the paper's
editors had their own worrystones, and he wondered if they too had dreamed.
He spent the day cleaning house and mowing lawn. He itched to be doing
something, and he hated the thought of the next few weeks. He had had enough of
students in the year just past, and here he was about to take on more. He wished
he could enjoy summer teaching as much as Ybarra seemed to, or Ellen, or Di.
Franklin was as unhappy as he.
Toward the end of the afternoon, his mother called from Seattle. She had never
accompanied him and his Dad on their fishing trips when he was a boy, and she
had never seemed to worry until after Dad's death. Then, almost as if her
husband's final disease had been pneumonia caught on a Puget salmon boat, and
not the cancer that had withered his arms and legs, she had forbidden the sport.
Alec had had to wait for college before he could return to the forests and
streams he had been raised to love. Sometimes he wondered why he hadn't become a
biologist like Di.
Perhaps it was just that she had seemed so pleased when he told her he was going
to major in English. As it was, every time she had known of his trips, she had
called for assurance that he hadn't drowned. This time was no different, though
her hectoring was brief. She had a stone of her own; like him, she had dreamed;
and she was wondering what it meant to find her stone a mate.



Like Alec and Ybarra, Di and Ellen had revealed nothing at the roadblock. Their
shards were their own, secrets to be hoarded, and they were confident that
Franklin felt the same. He had been ahead of them, and yet the cop had shown no
suspicion.
Di lived in a university apartment near the edge of campus. She had three rooms,
with large windows and daffodil walls, furnished in an ordinary mixture of
modern and antique. Her desk was a tall secretary she had inherited from her
grandmother.
Once she knew how widespread the eggs and worrystones were, she was tempted to
call Alec. Would he turn the stone in now? She wanted to keep her shards, danger
or no. She wanted to see more of him, yet she was also leery of changing their
relationship. She and the others shared a rare warmth and easiness, flawed only
by Franklin's endless pursuit of Ellen. She didn't want to increase that flaw,
to weaken the group's unity with a relationship that might too easily become
exclusionary.
She did not call him. She called no one, though early Sunday afternoon Ellen did
call her. The two took a walk then, wandering through the campus arboretum and
the woods beyond it while steering clear of the hundreds of others who seemed to
have the same thing in mind. They were exploring a sumac thicket when they heard
a triumphant yell. They burst back onto the path in time to see a heavy-set man
in blue jeans and graying beard stagger toward them, an egg cradled in his arms.