"Frank Herbert - The Santaroga Barrier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Herbert Brian & Frank)

The Santaroga Barrier

Frank Herbert
1968

First published in a shorter version in Amazing Stories magazine, 1967.




Chapter 1


The sun went down as the five-year-old Ford camper-pickup truck ground over
the pass and started down the long grade into Santaroga Valley. A
crescent-shaped turn-off had been leveled beside the first highway curve.
Gilbert Dasein pulled his truck onto the gravel, stopped at a white barrier
fence and looked down into the valley whose secrets he had come to expose.

Two men already had died on this project, Dasein reminded himself. Accidents.
Natural accidents. What was down there in that bowl of shadows inhabited by
random lights? Was there an accident waiting for him?

Dasein's back ached after the long drive up from Berkeley. He shut off the
motor, stretched. A burning odor of hot oil permeated the cab. The union of
truckbed and camper emitted creakings and poppings.

The valley stretching out below him looked somehow different from what Dasein
had expected. The sky around it was a ring of luminous blue full of sunset
glow that spilled over into an upper belt of trees and rocks.

There was a sense of quiet about the place, of an island sheltered from
storms.

What did I expect the place to be? Dasein wondered. He decided all the maps
he'd studied, all the reports on Santaroga he'd read, had led him to believe
he knew the valley. But maps were not the land. Reports weren't people.

Dasein glanced at his wristwatch: almost seven. He felt reluctant to
continue.

Far off to the left across the valley, strips of green light glowed among
trees. That was the area labeled "greenhouses" on the map. A castellated
block of milky white on an outcropping down to his right he identified as the
Jaspers Cheese Cooperative. The yellow gleam of windows and moving lights
around it spoke of busy activity.

Dasein grew aware of insect sounds in the darkness around him, the
swoop-humming of air through nighthawks' wings and, away in the distance, the
mournful baying of hounds. The voice of the pack appeared to come from beyond