"Whats It Like Out There by Edmond Hamilton" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Edmond)

and I was glad to sit down iu the bus depot while I went
through the thin little phone book.
There were three Graham families in the book, but the
first one I called was the right oneMiss lla Graham. She
talked fast and excited, and said she'd come right over, and
I said I'd wait in front of thi-' bus depot.
I stood underneath the awning, looking down the quiet
street and thinking that it sort of explained why Jim Cly-
mer had always been such ~ quiet, slow-moving sort of guy.
The place was sort of relaxed, like he'd been.
A coupe pulled up, and Miss Graham opened the door.
She was a brown-haired girl, not especially good-looking,
but the kind you think of as a nice girl, a very nice girl.
She said, "You look so tired that I feel guilty now about
asking you to stop."
"1m all right," I said. "And it's no trouble stopping over a
couple of places on my way back to Ohio."
As we drove across the little town, I asked her if Jim
hadn't had any family of his own here.
"His parents were killed in a car crash years ago," Miss
Graham said. "He lived with an uncle on a farm outside
Grandview, but they didn't get along, and Jim came into
town and got a job at the power station."
She added, as we turned a comer, "My mother rented
him a room. That's how we got to know each other. That's
how wehow we got engaged."
"Yeah, sure," I said.
It was a big square house with a deep front porch, and
some trees around it. I sat down in a wicker chair, and Miss
Graham brought her mother out. Her mother talked a little
about Jim, how they missed him, and how she declared he'd
been just like a son.
When her mother went back in, Miss Graham showed me
a little bunch of blue envelopes, "These were the letters I
got from Jim. There weren't very many of them, and they
weren't very long."
"We were only allowed to send one thirty-word message
every two weeks," I told her. "There were a couple of thou-
sand of us out there, and they couldn't let us jam up the
message transmitter all the time."
"It was wonderful how much Jim could put into just a
few words," she said, and handed me some of them.
I read a couple. One said, "I have to pinch myself to
realize that I'm one of the first Earthmen to stand on an
alien world. At night, in the cold, I look up at the green star
that's Earth and can't quite realize I've helped an age-old
dream come true."
Another one said, "This world's grim and lonely, and mys-
terious. We don't know much about it yet. So far, nobody's
seen anything living but the lichens that Expedition One