"Nancy Kress - Saviour" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kress Nancy)

Ann said, "You never despaired over Fermi's Paradox? You thought all along that
aliens would show up eventually, they just hadn't got around to it yet?"

"Yes," Cowell said, and didn't look at her directly. How to explain? It wasn't belief
so much as desire, nor desire so much as life-long need. Very adolescent, and he
wouldn't have admitted it except he was cold and exhausted and exhilarated and
scared, and the best he could hope for, jammed in with other "visiting scientists" two
miles away from the landing site, was a possible glimpse of the object as it streaked
down over the treeline.

"Jim, that sounds so ... so ..."

"A man has to believe in something," he said in a gruff voice, quoting a recent bad
movie, swaggering a little to point up the joke. It fell flat. Ann went on staring at him
in the harsh glare of the floodlights until someone said, "Bitte? Ein Kaffee, Ann?"

"Hans!" Ann said, and she and Dr Hans Kleinschmidt rattled merrily away in
German. Cowell knew no German. He knew Kleinschmidt only slightly, from those
inevitable scientific conferences featuring one important paper, ten badly attended
minor ones, and three nights of drinking to bridge over the language difficulties.

What language would the aliens speak? Would they have learned English from our
secondhand radio and TV broadcasts, as pundits had been predicting for the last
thirty-six hours and writers for the last seventy years? Well, it was true they had
chosen to land on the American-Canadian border, so maybe they would.

So far, of course, they hadn't said anything at all. No signal had come from the
oval-shaped object hurtling towards Earth.

"Coffee," Ann said, thrusting it at Cowell. Kleinschmidt had appar-ently brought a
tray of Styrofoam cups from the emergency station at the edge of the field. Cowell
uncapped his and drank it gratefully, not caring that it was lukewarm or that he didn't
take sugar. It was caffeine.

"Twenty minutes more," someone said behind him.

It was a well-behaved crowd, mostly scientists and second-tier politicians. Nobody
tried to cross the rope that soldiers had strung between hastily driven stakes a few
hours earlier. Cowell guessed that the unruly types, the press and first-rank space
fans and maverick businessmen with large campaign contributions, had all been
herded together elsewhere, under the watchful eyes of many more soldiers than were
assigned to this cornfield. Still more were probably assigned unobtrusivelyтАФCowell
hoped it was unobtrusivelyтАФto the Going-In Committee, waiting somewhere in a
sheltered bunker to greet the aliens. Very sheltered. Nobody knew what kind of drive
the craft might have, or not have. For all they knew, it was set to take out both
Minnesota and Ontario.

Cowell didn't think so.