"Richard McKenna - The Secret Place" - читать интересную книгу автора (McKenna Richard)

Though best known to the world as the author of The Sand
Pebbles, Richard McKenna had an earlier and most enthusias-
tic reception as a writer of first quality science fiction. It is
therefore most fitting that this story, one of a half dozen
found among his papers after his death, should receive the
Nebula Award as the Best Short Story of the year. It is a
sensitive piece of writing, a perfect example of second genera-
tion science fiction, the retelling and reexamination of a
theme that originated in the pulp years of this medium.

Nebula Award, Best Short Story 1966

THE SECRET PLACE

Richard McKenna
This morning my son asked me what I did in the war. He's
fifteen and I don't know why he never asked me before. I
don't know why I never anticipated the question.
He was just leaving for camp, and I was able to put him off
by saying I did government work. He'll be two weeks at
camp. As long as the counselors keep pressure on him, he'll
do well enough at group activities. The moment they relax it,
he'll be off studying an ant colony or reading one of his
books. He's on astronomy now. The moment he comes home,
he'll ask me again just what I did in the war, and I'll have to
tell him.
But I don't understand just what I did in the war. Some-
times I think my group fought a death fight with a local myth
and only Colonel Lewis realized it. I don't know who won.
All I know is that war demands of some men risks more
obscure and ignoble than death in battle. I know it did of me..
It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the
desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold
ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal
ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in
1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents
traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near
Barker. Dr. Lewis was called to duty as a reserve colonel and
ordered to find the vein. But the whole area was overlain by
thousands of feet of Miocene lava flows and of course it was
geological insanity to look there for a pegmatite vein. The area
had no drainage pattern and had never been glaciated. Dr.
Lewis protested that the crystal could have gotten there only
by prior human agency.
It did him no good. He was told he's not to reason why.
People very high up would not be placated until much money
and scientific effort had been spent in a search. The army sent
him young geology graduates, including me, and demanded
progress reports. For the sake of morale, in a kind of
frustrated desperation, Dr. Lewis decided to make the project