"Tom Easton - The Bung Hole Caper" - читать интересную книгу автора (Easton Thomas A)

The Bung-Hole Caper
by Tom Easton
_The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction_, April 1982

The aliens came to Earth the same spring that Cyrus Holmes found the old barrel. It was buried under a
stack of old lumber in a dark corner of the barn, and it would have stayed buried if Cyrus hadn't been
looking for his grandfather's tool chest. Grandpa had been a cooper all his life, and when he was gone,
the tools had been stored away. They included a cooper's adze, which Cyrus thought might be just the
thing for roughing out a new plow handle.

He found the adze. Once sharpened, it worked as well as he had hoped. He also found the barrel, and
that was in rather worse shape. It had been drying for half a century, forgotten in the shadows, and its
staves now fitted as badly as fence pickets. But a month or two in the pond would fix that, he told Allie,
his wife. Then he could replace the hoops and have a decent vessel to harden his cider in.

All through that summer, Cyrus tended the barrel. He soaked the wood in pond water, watching the
wood swell and tighten. He replaced the hoops with cobblings from his workbench. He stood the thing in
the yard, filled it from the hose, and watched as the last leaks slowed and stopped. Finally, it was as tight
as it would ever be, and the apples in his small orchard weren't quite ready.

In the meantime, there were the aliens. Cyrus knew all about them. He didn't have a tractor or a chain
saw or an electric milker. He worked his fields with a yoke of oxen, cut his firewood with an axe, and
milked his dozen cows by hand. Still, he was up-to-date enough. He had a car, for getting to church of a
Sunday and so Allie could drive to her job in town. He had a radio or two. He even had a teevee set,
and he never missed the six-thirty news.

He knew all about the aliens. He'd seen pictures of them, all smothered in pastel-patterned coal-scuttle
helmets, like something out of a movie about the Great War. He'd heard they were refugees from some
foreign disaster or war, and he knew they were asking for a place to settle in the ocean shallows,
promising not to interfere with navigation or fishing--they farmed their food on land--and offering to
trade. They had science beyond anything Earth knew, they had technology, and they had a price list. The
space for a small colony, a little place to call their own, for instance, was worth the plans for a space
drive. Help in settling in was worth a map to worlds that men could live on. Other things were worth
money, credits that could be exchanged for travel tickets, for lesser goods, even for alien encyclopedias,
suitably translated. Earth was drooling.

Cyrus thought it all interesting enough, but he was a farmer, a raw-boned, weathered outcropping of
Maine's coastal hills. The aliens scarcely touched his life, and they never would, any more than the rest of
modern life did. Too, he'd never seen an alien. Not many people had, for though they traveled plenty,
they did it in closed black limousines, chauffeured by UN flunkies.

Cyrus--he hated being called "Cy" so much that anyone who dared be so familiar might get day-old eggs
or half-soured milk--Cyrus put the aliens on a par with Florida hurricanes and California floods and
Detroit strikes. They were all interesting. They all made the news. And he thought about them only when
they crossed the flickering screen of his teevee set.

But the day came, it did. His apples ripened, and he gathered up the falls and picked the rest. He set a
basket of the best down cellar for winter eating, helped Allie put up two dozen jars of applesauce, and
filled the trailer with the bags and boxes that remained. Then he visited the cider mill.
The mill was Bob Witham's. An ancient rig of flapping belts and groaning gears, powered by a gasoline