"Whitley Strieber - Majestic" - читать интересную книгу автора (Strieber Whitley)

does not know secrets and it does not know fear. But mankind is not the only earthly creation that fears
death. Everything fears it. And when there is resurrection every living thing will be delivered, from the crawlers
in the mud to the high bishops, and fear will be swept from the earth forever. When they came, everything
was afraid.
Birds awoke as they passed over, and fluttered nervously. Coons and bobcats screamed, opossums hissed.
Babies shrieked in the night.
When they came it was midnight in Washington. Will Stone was a young man then, struggling to create a
postwar career for himself in the Central Intelligence Group, soon to become the C.I.A. He knew nothing of
what was happening in distant New Mexico.
His memory of what he was doing that night is nevertheless vivid. This shouldn't be surprising; we tend to
recall exactly where we were at moments of great crisis.
A familiar wartime question: "What were you doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor?" Will Stone
remembered: he was standing in a department store looking at some ties. "Where were you when the Japs
surrendered?" He was drunk in Algiers. What was he doing on the night of July 2, 1947? He was lying in bed
in his apartment worrying about the fact that he was having political problems at the office. Instead of working
on the Russian desk he was off in a backwater, helping the Algerians put an end to French colonialism.
Betty and Sam White were sitting on their porch in Roswell sipping lemonade and watching the sky. It was a
beautiful night, with storms off to the west and stars overhead.
I know just what they said, just how they acted. I've read their files - and all the other files that Will has -
many times over.
I've tried and tried to see where Will and the others went wrong, to understand if there is anything in God's
world that might help us now.
"What's that," Sam asked his wife back on that lost night. "I'm not real sure," she replied in her twangy voice.
"I'm gonna call the sheriff." He got up from his chair with a creak of porch boards and a grunt.
The object was round and brightly lit - glowing, in fact. It made no sound as it swept northwestward across
Roswell.
Beneath its thin blue light people went about their business. Except for the Whites, nobody noticed a thing.
At the Army Air Field the radar operators did not glance up from their glowing screens. The lookout on the
tower was facing the other way, and never broke the imaginary monologue he was delivering to Dorothy
Lamour.
Bob Ungar, on his ranch seventy miles northwest of Roswell, watched the storms with a critical and uneasy
eye. He was totally unaware of what was approaching from the direction of town. BobтАЩs concern was the
dimmed clouds.
They could drop hail us big us a sheep's eye. Hail like that could knot a man's skull or butter his animals until
they were crazy. He'd also found his share of sheep braised by lightning, lying stiff in the scrub.
The worst part was the way they'd bunch up on the fences during a bad storm, frightened by the thunder and
trying to shelter from the rain. You'd find them in heaps, and the ones at the bottom would be smothered.
Bob pitied the poor, dumb things. I know he did, because I know exactly what kind of a man he was. I admire
him unabashedly.
He died in the sixties, old and dried to straw by the desert.
Walking the path of Will Stone I spoke to Bob's wife, Ellie, now a very old woman. She lives in an adobe
cottage - really little more than a hut. Of course she's been wracked by time, but there is within her a light
such as you don't often see. I spoke to her of her husband, and their old house that is in ruins now, and a
long time ago.
I can imagine Bob standing on his back porch on that night, squinting into the dark west.
A long, cool gust swirled out of the dark. The air grew eerie. The last five nights he'd saddled up his horse,
Sadie, and gone out to help the sheep. It hadn't made a lick of difference. They'd gotten themselves killed
anyway.
You'd think sheep had been going through thunderstorms for a long time. But this bunch, they got all worked
up over a little sheet lightning, forget the thunder and wind and the hail.