"Jeff Hecht - The Saucer Man" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

of years after our sun is gone. This gives the Brysst their patience, and
their patience gives them their wisdom."
I can do the spiel for hours if I have to; Melinda taught me well. She
had 638 pages of it down on paper when we met, although she didn't tell me
about it for a few weeks. When she did, I suggested doing a book proposal and
running it by Angie. It started as science fiction, but Angie said it would
sell better as "fact." I didn't like the idea, but by then I hadn't worked in
two and a half years, Melinda had just moved into my tiny apartment, and the
rent was three months overdue.
Melinda and I spent eight wild and crazy months turning her "Meeting
the Aliens" into "The Secret World of the Brysst." I cut and pasted Melinda's
pages and rewrote them on an old PC the company had sold for $50 after the
layoffs.
The publisher loved it, but Melinda freaked when Angie mentioned a
promo tour. She flat-out wouldn't do it, and insisted we take her name off the
book. I figured the weirding out was a legacy of her checkered past. I knew
she had lived in a commune; she knew about my ex-wife the lawyer and my former
career as a merchant of death. We preferred to avoid the gory details.
The paid speaking tours came after that, as Angie hustled the market
for all it was worth. Melinda wrote more, but she wasn't happy with the second
book, and started claiming that some of the acid hippies on the Oregon commune
really were aliens. We fought over it before I left on the speaking tour; when
I returned, she had moved out, leaving only a short note and a stack of bills.
The third book never came. "You have to have something new," Frances,
my editor, had told me after she read the proposal. "Marketing says they can
only sell two books on the same thing. Do a third and you cut into sales of
the first two. Don't you have something new to say?" She suggested abductions
and experiments, but after I hung up, I realized I could not make the Brysst
snatch any human being who didn't want to go. They had too much of Melinda in
them.
What I told the ladies of Lawrence was "the Brysst aren't ready for
contact with all of humanity. But they gave me a message of hope for all
intelligent beings in the universe: there can be peace, if we make it happen
among ourselves." The spiel comes with pitches for toleration and racial
harmony that I vary from place to place. Sometimes the whole thing sounds as
outdated as the George Adamski book from the 50s that I picked up in a used
bookstore, but it plays well in the American Heartland. My stories are more
comforting than the supermarket tabloids. Angie summed it up as "You're safe
weirdness."
They had questions, but the toughest one came from the high-school girl
at the projector. "Do they have the same DNA and RNA genetic material we do?"
I hedged, as I had learned to do when selling laser fantasies to colonels,
then settled down to sign books.
The girl who had run the projector was first in line. If I had ever
settled down, I could have had a kid her age. A couple dozen older ladies
followed. I asked their names and signed each book, until only two were left
in line.
The first was the president of the Ladies' Club. Her piercing blue eyes
stared through me. "You certainly have had some interesting experiences, young
man," she began. "I wish my Ralphie had grown up like you." She smiled as I