"Zach Hughes - Seed of the Gods" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hughes Zach)

showing, dimming the glow of the flying saucer.

Ocean City, an early rising town, was waking. It would be a sad day for
fish. Everyone in town owned a boat either for making money or for
escaping the tensions of making money ashore and the mackerel were
running. On Main Street, Ocean County's only stop light was silent and
dead. Sooly shifted down, engine whining, rolled down the window to see
if her escort were still around, saw it low and directly above her, and rolled
up the window. She turned up the radio and broke the speed limit on
Water Street making it down to the small clapboard restaurant on the
Yacht Basin. The flying saucer stopped with her, shifted almost
uncertainly as she ran from the car to the building, then settled low above
the flat roof of the restaurant.

There was the smell of buttered pancakes, coffee, an arrogant early
morning cigar, stale fumes of booze from a sad looking party of four
fishermen who had spent the night drinking and playing poker instead of
resting in preparation for the early departure from the docks. Most of the
tables were filled. Sooly paused inside the door, liking the friendly buzz of
voices, the clink of forks against plates, the tight, odorous security of the
place. The slight shiver which jerked her arms could have been the result
of the abrupt change from the early coolness of the outdoors to the moist
closeness of the restaurant. She saw Bud. He was sitting with a couple of
the charter boat skippers. He had a woolen sock cap pushed back from his
forehead, his long hair puffing out around it. He was lifting a coffee cup
when she spotted him, and the movement seemed to her to be as full of
athletic grace as a Bart Starr pass.

For long moments she stood there melting inside as she looked at him.
Then she moved toward him, a solidly built, All-American-girl-type in a
warm sweat shirt and cut-off jeans, legs smooth and healthy below the
ragged blue, breasts making their presence known even through the bulky
shirt, hair cut short for ease of upkeep, no makeup except for a slight flush
from the early morning air. She moved with hip-swaying ease through the
crowded tables, smiling at Bud with pretty, white teeth, her brown eyes
speaking but unable to communicate her fabulously warm feeling.

Bud was an easy smiler with a handsome handlebar mustache, bushy
eyebrows. He was better looking, she thought, than Elliot Gould and,
although not quite as groovy, even more handsome than George Peppard.
As she approached him she felt that vast, surging love sweep through her
body with a force which caused her step to falter as her mind overflowed
with a confusion of nice thoughts: young puppies and clean babies in blue
bassinets and rooms with thick red carpets and cozy fireplaces and the
smell of broiled steak and baby formula.

"Hi, Sooly," Bud said. "I tole 'em the usual." He didn't bother to stand.
You don't stand up for the girl you've been dating since the tenth grade,
the girl who wrote you seven hundred and thirty letters during the two
years you were in the service and over in Nam at a cost of seventy-three