"George R. R. Martin - WC 1 - Wild Cards" - читать интересную книгу автора (Martin George R R)

to let any of us, civilian or military, inspect the inside of his craft. Werner
and his Germans were reduced to questioning the alien about the drive, rather
compulsively I thought. As I understood it, theoretical physics and the
technology of space travel were not disciplines in which our visitor was
especially expert, so the answers he gave them were not very clear, but we did
grasp that the drive made use of a hithertounknown particle that traveled faster
than light.
The alien had a term for the particle, as unpronounceable as his name. Well, I
had a certain grounding in classical Greek, like all educated men, and a flair
for nomenclature if I do say so myself. I was the one who devised the coinage
"tachyon." Somehow the GIs got things confused, and began referring to our
visitor as "that tachyon fellow." The phrase caught on, and from there it was
only a short step to Doctor Tachyon, the name by which he became generally known
in the press.

Colonel Edward Reid, U.S. Army Intelligence (Ret.)
You want me to say it, right? Every damned reporter I've ever talked to wants me
to say it. All right, here it is. We made a mistake. And we paid for it too. Do
you know that afterwards they came within a hair of court-martialing all of us,
the whole interrogation team? That's a fact. The hell of it is, I don't know how
we could have been expected to do things any differently than we did. I was in
charge of his interrogation. I ought to know. What did we really know about him?
Nothing except what he told us himself. The eggheads were treating him like Baby
Jesus, but military men have to be a little more cautious. If you want to
understand, you have to put yourself in our shoes and remember how it was back
then.
His story was utterly preposterous, and he couldn't prove a single damned thing.
Okay, he landed in this funny-looking rocket plane, except it didn't have
rockets. That was impressive. Maybe that plane of his did come from outer space,


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like he said.
But maybe it didn't. Maybe it was one of those secret projects the Nazis had
been working on, left over from the war. They'd had jets at the end, you know,
and those V-2s, and they were even working on the atomic bomb. Maybe it was
Russian. I don't know. If Tachyon had only let us examine his ship, our boys
would have been able to figure out where it came from, I'm sure. But he wouldn't
let anyone inside the damned thing, which struck me as more than a little
suspicious. What was he trying to hide?
He said he came from the planet Talds. Well, I never heard of no goddamned
planet Takis. Mars, Venus, Jupiter, sure. Even Mongo and Barsoom. But Takis? I
called up a dozen top astronomers all around the country, even one guy over in
England. Where's the planet Takis? I asked them. There is no planet Takis, they
told me.
He was supposed to be an alien, right? We examined him. A complete physical, X
rays, a battery of psychological tests, the works. He tested human. Every which
way we turned him, he came up human. No extra organs, no green blood, five