"Dave Hutchinson - Discreet Phenomena" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hutchinson Dave)

There was a brief silence in the Range Rover, while we all imagined it. Finally, Domino said, "It does look
a little like an hotel, you have to admit."
"Yeah," Harvey grumped. "Well." He honked the horn a couple of times, and the Poles in the back seat of
the Espace turned round and flipped us the finger. Harvey shook his head. "That's the Polacks, right?" Harvey
had inherited, from the Czech side of his family, a congenital dislike of Poles.
At Three-Mile Post we left Seldon territory and briefly found ourselves driving across Jim Dawes's land. On
either side of the road Jim's cornfields dipped and rose towards a shimmering tree-and-hedge-lined horizon
arched over by a white-hot sky.
At the crest of Sefton Hill a small riot of people was spilling out across the road. Harvey drove us past the
dozens of parked vehicles and down the other side of the hill until there was space to park. Then we walked
back up to the crowd.
Sefton Hill was said to command the most aesthetic vista in the area, a great even expanse of gently
rolling fields and hills that vanished into an uncertain and vaguely mystical heat-distorted distance peppered
with tumuli and standing stones and the occasional long barrow. It was so popular with tourists that every
summer Jim Dawes strategically positioned a little van in the layby selling strawberries and pots of honey.
"I love this," said Harvey when we reached the top of the hill, looking at the view he had inherited from the
English side of his family.
All around us, the World's Press were aiming their cameras into the middle distance. In the middle of one
of Jim's cornfields the crop had been crushed down to form a complex geometrical shape, like a deformed
star.
"It wasn't here last night," I heard one of the CNN team say behind us. "We were out here till ten, eleven
o'clock shooting the Evening Show, and I swear it wasn't there then."
Harvey was looking at the star-shape and shaking his head. "That's amazing, you have to admit," he said.

"It's a fake," someone said beside me.
I turned my head and saw that, without my noticing, a short young woman with very long brown hair had
moved in between Domino and me. "Beg pardon?"
"It's a hoax," she said. She was wearing a pair of jeans and a baggy washed-out Harlequins rugby shirt.
She wasn't a villager because I'd never seen her before, which these days would have suggested she was
either a journalist or a sightseer, but she didn't seem to be carrying any journalistic equipment and she didn't
have the blissed-out look of so many sightseers. "Some students from the London School of Economics
came down here last night and did it with some bits of wood and a couple of lengths of clothesline."
Domino looked down at her and frowned. "Why would they do that?" he asked politely.
"Because I paid them to," she said without looking at either of us.
"That's very interesting," Domino said gravely.
She nodded. "Any idiot can make those things." She looked up at me. "I'm Pauline Niven. You're Karen
Baxter's husband, aren't you."

"I wanted to prove that you can't believe everything you see," she said. "You can't look at a crop circle and
just assume it was made by little green men."
"We have Green Men here too," Domino put in. I nudged him to be quiet.
I said to Pauline, "Unless you really want to be lynched by a couple of hundred journalists and scientists
and assorted sightseers, I wouldn't mention this to anybody else."
 "That's the problem, you see?" she asked. "Everybody's just gone completely crazy over this place."
Crop circles-real and fake-were two a penny around Seldon; we had left Sefton Hill before the press pack
got bored and caused a mini rush-hour, and Harvey had driven us back to The Black Bull, where we had been
able to get a table and something to eat in the snug. Pauline was sitting opposite me, virtually vibrating with
nervous energy, a glass of orange juice clasped in her fist.
"The food in here's getting real strange," Harvey commented, returning from the food counter and sitting
down at our table. He put down his plate of chicken tikka and wild rice and poked it suspiciously with his fork.