"Alan Dean Foster - With friends like these." - читать интересную книгу автора (Foster Alan Dean)

began to leap upward from the waters. Translucent at first, the chalcedony towers began to pulse
with deep inner fires: blue, purple, gold, carmine, and finally a strange, yet familiar silver-
gray. The ionosphere, tickled, began to surround the flashing needles with auroras, clothing them
in blankets of coruscating radiance.
Following, the planet began to move after the Tpin.
On board the cruiser it was very quiet.
"I see," whispered Rappan idly, "that they are bringing their moon along also."
"You get accustomed to something like that," breathed an engineer. "A moon, I mean."
Old Alo was making mystic signs with his tentacles. "Egg of the Code, I almost feel sorry for the
Yops!"
The crew picked up this thread of awed enthusiasm as they began to relate the impossible sight to
their own personal views of the war. In no time the mood of jubilation was back again, stronger
than ever. Stimulants were broken out and passed among those who indulged in them. The
communicatorsтАФexcepting one PhrnnxтАФbegan to ply the spacewaves with brazen, challenging messages,
daring the Yops to locate them.
"Poor old Yops," whispered Phrnnx. "I can almost see AIo's point."
"Yes," replied the Professor. "There is only one thing that is worrying me."
"What is worrying you?" asked Phrnnx.
The Professor turned old eyes on him. They held irony, and they held musing.
"What," he said, "are we going to do with them when there are no more Yops?"


SOME NOTES CONCERNING A GREEN BOX

"With Friends Like These..." was my first published story, but my first professional sale wasn't
even conceived as a story.
In 1970 I discovered H. P. Lovecraft, Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Wilber Whateley, and the rest of the
Necronomical world of HPL. I was so taken I sat down and composed a long pseudoietter to August
Derleth, hoping he'd get a laugh (well, a smile, anyway) out of it.
Instead, back came a letter from the Wisconsin Prometheus declaring that if I'd cut about forty
percent from my story (story... what story? What's going on here?), he'd publish it in the next
semiannual issue of The Arkham Collector.
Total payment was forty dollars. I never saw a finer work of art, a more impressive piece of
draftsmanship, than that first check.

Sirs: I did not know what to do with these notes until a friend of mine suggested that I send them
along to you, assuming, I suppose, that you might find them of some interest. They form an
exceedingly odd story, one with which I am now not so sure I wish to be connected. I report them
here as they occurred.
I do not as a rule frequent the facilities of the anthropology department, but an occasion made it
necessary. Being a graduate student, I was able to obtain access to files which are kept from the



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eyes of careless undergraduates and casual visitors. It was in a far corner of the old manuscript-
storage room that I first came across the box.
It caught my eye because it was clearly the only new thing in the ancient place. Curious, I made a