"Eric Frank Russel - Sinister Barrier" - читать интересную книгу автора (Russell Eric Frank)

Sinister Barrier
By
Eric Frank Russell




Foreword
IT would be idle to pretend and dishonest to suggest that Sinister Barrier is anything other than
fiction. Some may regard it as fantasy because it is placed in the future and depicts certain
developments likely in times to come. But I regard it as a sort of fact-fiction solely because I do
sincerely believe that if ever a story was based upon facts it is this one.

Sinister Barrier is as true a story as it is possible to concoct while presenting believe-it-or-not
truths in the guise of entertainment. It derives its fantastic atmosphere only from the queerness,
the eccentricity, the complete in-explicability-so far as dogmatic science is concerned-of the
established facts which gave it birth. These facts are myriad. I have them in the form of a
thousand press clippings snatched from half a hundred newspapers in the Old World and the
New. A thousand more were given me by adventurers hardier than myself; people who have
explored farther and more daringly into forbidden acres where only one law operates: that
curiosity kills the cat.

Despite my possession of a highly suggestive mountain of evidence, none of it jelled into a story
until three Americans came at me, not together, yet with cumulative effect. They formed an
unholy trinity out of whom was born Sinister Barrier's religion of damnation. The first of these
three, a San Franciscan lover of long-distance debate, asked, "Since everyone wants peace, why
don't we get it?" The second, a bellicose Iowan, demanded, "If there are extra-terrestrial races
further advanced than ourselves, why haven't they visited us already?" Until I encountered the
third, Charles Fort, it didn't occur to me that perhaps we had been visited and were still being
visited, without being aware of it. Charles Fort gave me what might well be the answer to both
these questions. Casually but devastatingly, he said, "I think we're property." And that is the plot
of Sinister Barrier.

When first this story appeared, its publishers, Street & Smith, of New York, gave it a tremendous
boost throughout their chain of magazines, describing it as "the greatest imaginative yarn of two
decades" and forecasting that it would "go down in history along with H. G. Wells' War of the
Worlds, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Sutton Vane's Outward
Bound." At that time I thought they were overdoing it-they'd be the death of me yet. There are
moments when it's sinful to reveal the truth, and the wages of sin is death. But I remain alive,
which is satisfactory proof that the story's basis is a lot of nonsense ... or do I owe my
preservation to the need for that "proof?"
Anyway, this narrative's sales have reached the quarter million mark and, inevitably, some
readers have mailed me quantities of reports on supernormal happenings snipped from their local
papers. Because of this further piling-up of evidence, and because of the bloody nature of the
promised history through which the yarn has gone down, I remain more than ever ready to accept
that there is some truth in its basic proposition, namely, that Man is not and never has been the
master of his fate and the captain of his soul. "I think we're property." Charles Fort had something
there! We've long been the property of common germs, haven't we?

I wrote this story, but it isn't mine, or not in the sense that other stories have been mine. This one