"Bruce Holland Rogers - Alexandrian Light" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

Alexandrian Light
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1990 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


The rain continued to drive into the trees above them, dripping from the highest canopies to the shorter
trees, then onto the lower vines and creepers. It dribbled along the leaves to fall finally in heavy dollops
that Pereira called gotar├гos. The two men sat outside the small tent that sheltered the radio, their tools,
and the dynamite. Both listened carefully to the transmissions on the military band, though Hacker
understood no Portuguese.
The garrison at Obidos, Pereira told Hacker, was falling to the Soviets.
Hacker again pulled the length of cloth from his knapsack. Even in this grey light its colors were
brilliant and shifted subtly across the spectrum as his hands moved beneath it. A drop fell and pooled
there. Hacker turned the cloth over, and the water rolled off. He felt where it had been. Dry. But the
material seemed too soft, too natural to repel so completely. The shifting colors shimmered hypnotically.
Pereira had switched bands and had more news. Someone was bombing Manaus. If it was the
Americans, they would be able to stop the Soviet convoy on the Amazon and shield the paratroops who
had dropped hours ago into Cairo.
So it was the Americans who would arrive here first. It didn't matter. Hacker and Pereira had made up
their minds hours ago when they had pieced together what was happening and why. They had decided
how they would act, and that decision meant that it mattered little who arrived first.
If the Americans found them, they would see Hacker as a traitor. Traitors didn't get trials these days. If
the Soviets were to arrive first, they would see Hacker as a saboteur. In either case, Pereira was an
accomplice.
Their one chance for survival, aside from the unlikely possibility of remaining undetected in the jungle,
had been to be captured by the Sino-Japanese. Hacker reasoned that, of the three superpowers, they
were the least imperialistic. They were more interested in maintaining the balance of power than in getting
an edge on the Soviets and the Americans. The Sino-Japanese might even welcome the two geologists as
heroes. But the Asians were still crossing the Andes from Peru. Their army would be the last on the
scene.
Pereira killed the radio. The paratroops cutting their way through the jungle would arrive soon, and air
support much sooner. They could put it off no longer.
Together they gathered their dynamite.
***


The walk to the site was much easier than the first time when they had hacked their way through with
machetes to investigate what they had assumed was a meteorite impact. It had seemed like an adventure,
a fine excuse to leave off the serious work of their geological survey.
***


Not a hundred meters from where they had left the tent, there it was, cracked open like two nut halves
on the black jungle floor. The child-sized bodies were covered with a fabric that changed colors as
Hacker moved around to examine them again. Not human, but, mangled though they were, not