"Edward M. Lerner - Moonstruck" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lerner Edward M)

for three hundred had been canceled.
A Secret Service agent turned waiter for the evening came through the double doors, a single half-empty
glass on his tray. "One of the aliens set this down. K'ddl I think, but I can't really tell 'em apart yet. Sorry
it wasn't any fuller."
Kyle nodded his thanks. "Doesn't matter. It's more than we need." He tore the sterile wrapper from an
eyedropper, then extracted a few milliliters from the alien's glass. The sample went into an automated
mass spectrometer.
The analyzer beeped as it completed its tests. The color display lit up, chemical names and their
concentrations scrolling down the screen. Water. Very dilute carbonic acid: carbon dioxide in solution,
basic fizz. Traces of calcium and magnesium salts. Kyle compared the list to a sample taken before the
aliens had arrived. As best he could tell, the glass contained pure Perrier.
"Kyle?"
He turned to the casually dressed engineer, a friend from the nearby Naval Research Labs, who'd spent
the evening in the kitchen. "Yeah, Larry?"
"The air samples are different." To an eyebrow raised in interrogation, Larry added, "Check the plots
yourself."
Kyle rolled out two strip charts, one annotated "6:05 p.m." and the other "9:00 p.m." Spikes of
unrecognized complex hydrocarbons appeared on only the later sheet. If what passed for alien saliva
held no trace of metabolic toxins, apparently their exhalations did. Still, the nine-o'clock spike seemed
somehow familiar.
Ah.
"Can I bum a cigarette, Lar, and a match?" He lit up clumsily, almost choking as he inhaled. Waving
away the suddenly solicitous engineer, he took a more cautious drag. He directed part of this lungful into
a test tube, which he quickly stoppered.
Larry, catching on quickly, ran the latest sample through the mass spectrometer. The resulting strip
chart, marked "10:11 p.m.," soon lay beside the others.
The evening's addition to the White House air was simply tobacco smoke. Whatever toxins the aliens ate
didn't appear in their breath, either.
Kyle poured a fresh cup of coffee, only in part to wash the unaccustomed and unwelcome smoke
residues from his mouth. He also hoped for a caffeine jolt to settle jangled nerves. First, the conundrum
about the aliens' inconvenient orbit around the moon; now, undetectable toxins.


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 - Chapter 2

He wondered when, or if, his study of the aliens would begin to make sense.



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Framed




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- Chapter 3