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

Hans Kleinschmidt had moved away. Abruptly Cowell said to Ann, "Didn't you ever
stare at the night sky and just will them to be there? When you were a kid, or even a
grad student in astronomy?"

She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. "Well, sure. Then. But I never
thought... I just never thought. Since." She shrugged, but something in her tone
made Cowell turn full face and peer into her eyes.

"Yes, you did."

She answered him only indirectly. "Jim . . . there could be nobody aboard."

"Probably there isn't," he said, and knew that his voice betrayed him. Not belief so
much as desire, not desire so much as need. And he was thirty-four goddamn years
old, goddamn it!

"Look!" someone yelled, and every head swivelled up, desperately searching a clear,
star-jewelled sky.

Cowell couldn't see anything. Then he could: a faint pinprick of light, marginally
moving. As he watched, it moved faster and then it flared, entering the atmosphere.
He caught his breath.

"Oh my God, it's swerving off course!" somebody shouted from his left, where
unofficial jerry-rigged tracking equipment had been assembled in a ramshackle group
effort. "Impossible!" someone else shouted, although the only reason for this was
that the object hadn't swerved off a steady course before now. So what? Cowell felt
a strange mood grip him, and stranger words flowed through his mind: Of course.
They wouldn't let me miss this.

"A tenth of a degree northwest... no, wait..."

Cowell's mood intensified. With one part of his mind, he recognized that the mood
was born of fatigue and strain, but it didn't seem to matter. The sense of inevitability
grew on him, and he wasn't surprised when Ann cried, "It's landing here! Run!"
Cowell didn't move as the others scattered. He watched calmly, holding his
half-filled Styrofoam cup of too-sweet coffee, face tilted to the sky.

The object slowed, silvery in the starlight. It continued to slow until it was moving at
perhaps three miles per hour, no more, at a roughly forty-five-degree angle. The
landing was smooth and even.

There was no hovering, no jet blasts, no scorched ground. Only a faint whump as
the object touched the earth, and a rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind.

It seemed completely natural to walk over to the spacecraft. Cowell was the first one
to reach it.

Made of some smooth, dull-silver metal, he noted calmly, and unblackened by
re-entry. An irregular oval, although his mind couldn't pin down in precisely what the