"Alan Dean Foster - Lost and Found" - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

Telling them you were inchocolate, however, fell somewhere between saying that you had just inherited
fifty million dollars and that you had a brother who was a wholesale buyer for TiffanyтАЩs. Aside from the
beguiled expressions such an admission produced, you could smell the concomitant rise in hormone
production with one nostril pinched shut.

He chuckled to himself at the various images mention of his vocation engendered among members of
both sexes: everything from dashing world-traveling entrepreneur to stultifyingly dull owl-eyed
accountant. Nothing he could say ever changed anotherтАЩs perception of his profession.

Though the wooded slopes flanking the narrow, winding road were growing dark, he was not concerned.
HeтАЩd made the drive from his isolated encampment down into Bug Jump half a dozen times during the
past week and felt he knew the sorry excuse for a road pretty well. Returning uphill after dark, heтАЩd
travel more slowly. It was just that, while he had enjoyed proving wrong all of his friends who had
insisted he wouldnтАЩt last more than twenty-four hours in the Sierra Nevada wilderness without running
screaming for the nearest Starbucks, he had to admit that he did miss human company. While, based on
what he had seen so far, it would be a stretch to so classify some of the local denizens of downtown Bug
Jump, there were enough who struck him as being halfway normal for him to look forward to the
occasional jaunts into the bucolic mountain village.

Thus far heтАЩd spent five nights of his agreed-upon week in the northern California mountains camping
out alone, as promised. With just two more days to go before he drove back to Sacramento to catch his
return flight home, he felt he deserved a bit of a break. There was a grocery store in Bug Jump. There
was a bank-cum-post office combo. There was a gas station. And so, of course, there was a bar.
Bouncing and grinding down the steep slope of half-graded decomposing granite, racing the onset of
night, he was not heading for the bank.

The light that appeared in the sky was bright enough to not only draw his attention away from the
difficult thoroughfare, but to cause him to stop and temporarily put the big 4X4 in park. It idled at a
rumble, pleased at the opportunity to rest, like a male lion contentedly digesting half a dead wildebeest.

Now what the hell is that? he found himself wondering as he rolled down the driverтАЩs side window and
stuck his head partway out. Could it be a meteorite? Living in Chicago, one didnтАЩt see many meteorites.
One didnтАЩt see many stars, for that matter, and sometimes even the moon was a questionable indistinct
splotch behind the clouds. Watching the bright object descend at a steep angle, he was fully aware he
had little basis for comparison and small knowledge with which to evaluate what he was seeing.

Within the light, he thought he could make out a slightly oblong shape. That couldnтАЩt be right. Falling
meteorites were rounded, werenтАЩt they? Or cometlike, with a fiery tail? Did they blink in and out like
this one as they made their doomed plunge through the atmosphere? It seemed to him that the object was
falling too slowly to be a meteorite, but what did he know about representative intraatmospheric


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 LostandFound

velocities of terminal substellar objects?

Then it was gone, vanished behind the tall trees. He sat there for a long moment, listening. For several
minutes there was no sound at all. Then an owl hooted querulously. Burned up completely, whatever it
was, he decided. Or hit the ground a long, long ways off. Certainly it hadnтАЩt made a sound. Rolling up