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

part of the station. The rest was alien territory, hermetically sealed against
both the Earth and the vacuum.
I asked what the real aliens looked like. They showed me pictures of
creatures with two arms, two legs, and a head, though the face was deformed by
human standards, devoid of hair, with conical ears that tilted in different
directions, and without anything I recognized as nostrils. They showed me maps
of their sky and pictures of their planet, earthlike yet not earth. I asked
more questions, my brain racing in overdrive, but I can remember few of my
questions and fewer of their answers.
We were back at the barn by 4 a.m., in time to close the roof and drive
back to their house. "Are you convinced?" asked one Waverly as we drove
through the early morning darkness. "Will the Brysst be convinced?"
"Yes," was the only answer I could give. My mind was foggy from lack of
sleep, but I knew I would have say more. "The Brysst will have to council on
it." Surely aliens would need time to decide how to deal with other aliens,
whose presence they not suspected before. I needed time. "It may take weeks or
months."
"We understand," Abigail said as the car pulled into the drive. "It
took us time to decide to contact you. Will you stay with us while they
decide?"
I shook my head automatically. "I can't. I have other talks scheduled,
and other commitments."
They looked at each other and agreed, then let me go to bed, where the
note Melinda had left fluttered in my brief uneasy dreams: "I have to leave,
Jack. I think we made a mistake."
When morning came, the sisters greeted me with a big bowl of hearty
home-cooked oatmeal and a glass of milk. It reminded me of my maiden aunt's
house in Glens Falls, where as a child I would hide from the busy world for a
few days each summer. As I ate, they asked what the Brysst had said when I
them.
I swallowed the cereal and looked up at the sisters. The game was over.
"I'm a fraud," I said flatly. "The Brysst are a hoax my ex cooked up. She took
off and left me stuck with them. Without this con, I'd be flipping burgers
somewhere."
The biological constructs stared immobile at me, not programmed to deal
with such unwanted truths. Back on the space ship, the real aliens must have
been upset. I felt suspended in time as the sisters stared blankly; when one
finally spoke, I felt freed.
"She must have known them. Where is she?"
There was no threat in the words, but I shivered. Were the aliens deaf
to my words? Or was it I who had been deaf? Deaf to Melinda and only opening
my ears to hear when they had shown me a reality I could not deny? "Oregon," I
said. Her note had said she was going back. She had shown me the town on a
map, the once we had sat and traced the wanderings of our lives. It was in the
Willamette Valley. She had said it was a beautiful place.
"Can you find her?"
"I don't know." Melinda could have wandered far in two years. I stopped
before my mind could start down the well-worn path of excuses and lies. Only
Melinda would know the truth, and I wanted to know it as much as the Waverlys
did. "We'll have to try."