"Chad Oliver - Shadows in the Sun" - читать интересную книгу автора (Oliver Chad)

He stood in front of the whitewashed cafe and considered. He was a big man, standing a shade under
six feet and pushing two hundred pounds. His brown eyes were shrewd and steady. He was dressed in the
local uniform khaki shirt and trousers, capped with a warped, wide-brimmed felt hat at one end and cowboy
boots at the other. His Ph.D. didn't show, and he didn't look like the kind of a man who had often been
frightened.
Jefferson Springs waited for him quietly. The cafe was at the northern end of the town, on Main Street.
Main Street was split down the middle by the railroad, with its little station and loading platforms. Orange
trees were planted on both sides of the tracks. To his right, two blocks away, he could see the lights of the
Rialto, where a Mitzi Gaynor movie was now in progress. There were a few street lights, a few passing
cars moving very slowly, but Jefferson Springs was dark and shadow-crossed.
 Jefferson Springs. To the casual onlooker, it was nothing. A place to drive through on your way to the
city. A place to get gas, if you were lucky enough to find a station open after dark.
Paul Ellery knocked the ashes out of his pipe against the curb. He had read many books written by men
in search of the unknown, the mysterious. They had looked in the Arctic. They had looked in the jungles of
South America. They had looked in Africa, in Egypt, in Polynesia. They had taken telescopes and
spectroscopes and looked out into space, at the moon, at Mars, at Jupiter, at the stars beyond. They had
invented the electroencephalograph and had looked in the human brain.
No one had ever looked in Jefferson Springs. Jefferson Springs was no place to look for the unknown.
How known could you get?
Paul Ellery had spent the summer in Jefferson Springs. He hadn't merely lived there he had studied the
town. He had made schedules and charts and investigations, because that was his job. He had asked
questions and checked up on the answers. He had read the paper, examined the records, interviewed the
people. He had looked at Jefferson Springs the way he would at an Eskimo settlement or an African
village.
And Jefferson Springs didn't add up. Jefferson Springs wasn't what it seemed to be. Jefferson Springs
was different. Unknown? You could call it that, all right, and more.
He looked up and down the street. There was not a single human in sight. He walked around the corner
slowly, and got into his car, a Ford. He stuck the key in the ignition and just sat there, not knowing where to
go. He was beaten, and had he been anyone else he would have admitted the fact and gone his way. Paul
Ellery, however, was a stubborn man.
"The joint is jumping," he said aloud, staring at the empty town. "I wonder what's going down at the
morgue."
The stars were coming out above him now. He could smell the fragrance of the orange trees along the
railroad tracks. It was a lonely smell, and a nostalgic one. It made him think of Anne, less than two hundred
miles away in Austin. Two hundred miles that was four hours' driving time. If he left now, he could be there
a little after midnight. And why not? What was he accomplishing here?
But he knew he wouldn't go. He couldn't go, not yet. Not until he knew.
He had read a few lines, years ago, that had intrigued him enough to start him out on a career. He
thought of them now, as he had thought of them many times the past two months in Jefferson Springs.
The fact is, like it or not, that we know more about the Crow Indians than we do about the
average citizen of the United States. We know more about Samoan villages than we do about
American cities. We know a thousand times as much about the Eskimos as we do about the people
who live in the small towns of the so-called civilized world. Who lives there, in those unexplored
communities we drive through on our way to and from the great cities? What do they do, what do
they think, where do they come from, where are they going?
A shocking handful of small American villages have been scientifically studied by cultural
anthropologists and rural sociologists. The sample is so small as to be meaningless. The data are
hopelessly inadequate. We know as much about the planet Mars as we do about ninety-nine per cent
of our own country.
Look at the towns and villages and whistle-stops of America. Go into them with your eyes open,