"Jack Williamson - The Trial of Terra" - читать интересную книгу автора (Williamson Jack)

THE TRIAL OF TERRA
Jack Williamson

Author's Note
THE TRIAL OF TERRA was begun several years ago as a series of
stories based on the increasing astronomical evidence that we are not
alone in space-that millions or billions of other planets in the visible
universe are probably inhabited.
The series was interrupted when I signed a contract to write a comic
strip, Beyond Mars, about the astronauts of a future century. It was
interrupted again when I went to graduate school and began teaching
English, first at New Mexico Military Institute and the University of
ColoradoтАФwhere I am still working toward the Ph. D. in English
literatureтАФand later at Eastern New Mexico University, which is in my
home town, Portales.
Now finished at last, the novel seems to be just in time, what with John
Glenn and the other astronauts and cosmonauts well on their way to
discovering whatтАФor whoтАФis really waiting for us on the other side of the
moon.
тАФJack Williamson



Copyright ┬й 1962, by Ace Books, Inc.



To KARLA



I
On Earth, a secret agent cloaked in the native identity named Charles
Fort spent many years collecting the incredible. He published reports of
strange lights seen, of vanishing Ambroses, of imitation human beings,
of rains of fish and virgins, of holes in the sky.
 "The natives will never suspect that they are quarantined," he boasted
to his superiors on the moon at the end of his assignment. "I have them
doubting everything. Today we could land a starship at high noon in the
middle of their biggest village without letting them guess that we are
what we are!"



ON DENEBOLA IV, at the regional headquarters of the quarantine
service, some thirty light-years from the tranquilized natives, Wain Scarlet
was scanning a memo from the district office. Young man wanted, to
judge the life or death of a dozen planets. Must have one hundred years
experience in the service, and psionic classification five or better.
PayтАФwell, an enterprising deputy warden with the Earth to sell could set