"Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle - Fallen Angels" - читать интересную книгу автора (Niven Larry)

worse luck."
"Bob!"
"No, just bear with me. Let's go to your bedroom. I don't want you to
freeze."
He led her to the back of the house and she slid under the covers
without inviting him in. He lay on top, still wearing his thick leather coat.
Whatever he had in mind, she realized, it wasn't sex. Not with her
housecoat, the comforter and his greatcoat playing chaperone.
He kissed her hard and was whispering hoarsely in her ear before she
had a chance to react. "Angels down. A scoopship. It crashed."
"Angels?" Was he crazy?
 We know.
"We?"
"The Worldcon's in Minneapolis-St. Paul this year-тАФ"
The World Science Fiction Convention. "I got, the invitation, but I didn't
dare go. If anyone saw me-тАФ"
"-тАФAnd it was just getting started when the call came down from
Freedom. Sherrine, they couldn't have picked a better time or place to crash
their scoopship. That's why I came to you. Your grandparents live near the
crash site."
She wondered if there was a good time for crashing scoopships. "So?"
"We're going to rescue them."
"We? Who's we?"
"The Con Committee, some of the fans-тАФ"
"But why tell me, Bob? I'm fafiated. It's been years since I've dared
associate with fen."
Too many years, she thought. She had discovered science fiction in
childhood, at her neighborhood branch library. She still remembered that
first book: Star Man's Son, by Andre Norton. Fors had been persecuted
because he was different; but he nurtured a secret, a mutant power. Just the
sort of hero to appeal to an ugly-duckling little girl who would not act like
other little girls.
SF had opened a whole new world to her. A galaxy, a universe of new
worlds. While the other little girls had played with Barbie dolls, Sherrine
played with Lummox and Poddy and Arkady and Susan Calvin. While
they went to the malls, she went to Trantor and the Witch World. While
they wondered what Look was In, she wondered about resource depletion
and nuclear war and genetic engineering. Escape literature, they called it.
She missed it terribly.
"There is always one moment in childhood," Graham Greene had
written in The Power and the Glory, "when the door opens and lets the future
 Tis a Proud and Lonely Thing to Be a Fan, they used to say, laughing. It
had become a very lonely thing. The Establishment had always been hard
on science fiction. The government-funded Arts Councils would pass out
tax money to write obscure poetry for "little" magazines, but not to write
speculative fiction. "Sci-fi isn't literature." That wasn't censorship.
Perversely, people went on buying science fiction without grants.
Writers even got rich without government funding. They couldn't kill us that
way!
Then the Luddites and the Greens had come to power. She had watched