"Kevin J Anderson - Scientific Romance" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Kevin J)

it were his due. "Lovely euglena you have here under the light." He made
another noncommittal sound, then moved on to the other students.
Wells stood looking after his mentor, disappointed. Huxley had made no
mention of their shared experience with the meteor shower, their
imaginative conversation. He had come here for no purpose other than to
scrutinize his insignificant students ... in the same way that Wells and
Jennings had been studying the microbes.
His cheeks flushed, and the cool feverish sweat swept over him. He
extended his imagination further, wondering if other powerful beings might
even now be scrutinizing Earth in the same manner, curious about the
buzzing and swarming colony of London.
The hair on the back of his neck prickled, as if he could sense the
probing eyes watching him from afar.
He was startled to find Jennings regarding him oddly. "You don't look at
all well, Herbert," he said. Jennings reached over with practiced ease and
touched Wells's forehead. "In fact you're burning up." He frowned. "I
think you should go home and rest before this grows more serious."

The fever caught hold with nightmarish strength, and Wells fell into a
labyrinth of delirium fostered by the powerful resources of his own
imagination.
He saw meteors falling and falling, huge cylinders accompanied by green
fire that blazed across the sky. The interplanetary ships crashed to
Earth, pummeling England like quail shot.
In the great impact craters where they settled and cooled, the cylinders
opened up to reveal that they were warships from the red planet, carrying
hoards of invading Martians--hugely developed brains with tentacled limbs
that had evolved under a lower gravity.
Their vast mentalities had turned toward the conquest of Earth. The most
insignificant of these extraordinarily developed creatures had a military
intellect far superior to the combined genius of Napoleon and Alexander
the Great.
Using their whiplike appendages, the Martians built war machines, clanking
metal things on tall stiltlike legs that surpassed even the imagination of
Leonardo Da Vinci.
The clanking machines strode about the English landscape like industrial
contraptions he had seen among the dark factories of the dirty towns where
he had worked as a draper's apprentice. But these machines were equipped
with weapons, powerful heat rays that burned everything in sight.
Hot like Wells's fever.
And overhead the meteors continued falling, falling....

When the fever finally broke, Wells awoke in his narrow, lumpy bed to find
Jennings tending him, laying a cool rag over his forehead. A patch of
bright, hot sunlight spilled through the window, warming his skin.
Wells croaked, his voice uncooperative, but he spoke quickly, not wanting
his roommate to get the best of him with a first witticism. "What now
Jennings?" he said. "Are you practicing to become a doctor like your
father?"
Jennings smiled. His eyes were red-rimmed, as if he hadn't gotten much